The effects of machined and treated surface characteristics on the fatigue strength were analyzed on the basis of experimental results related to AISI D2 ground surface and AA 5083-H111 hammered surface. The fatigue strength improvement resulting from controlled grinding and mechanical surface treatment was discussed on the basis of the beneficial effect of the work hardening and the stabilized residual stress. A numerical procedure using F.E.M for calculating residual stress and work hardening evolution under cyclic loading has been developed. The validation of the numerical procedure was carried out by comparing the calculated residual stress profiles to those resulted from XRD measurements. The multi-axial criterion accounting for the work hardening and the residual stress was used to predict the fatigue life of notched samples.
IntroductionIt is well established that residual stress and work hardening, generated by machining and surface treatment processes, influence the fatigue life of mechanical parts [1][2][3]. That is why they are often considered in fatigue strength predictive models using multi-axial fatigue criteria [3] and fatigue life assessment by local strain-life approaches [4,5]. Experimental and modeling results confirm the detrimental effect of tensile residual stress which is considered to promote fatigue crack nucleation and to accelerate their propagation [6]. In contrary, it has been demonstrated that the compressive residual stress, generated by controlled machining processes and surface treatments, improves the fatigue strength by delaying the crack nucleation and by reducing the crack propagation rate [2,7,8]. However, most of published data related to fatigue crack nucleation and growth involving residual stress were discussed on the basis of their initial distribution [9][10][11]. Moreover, the majority of fatigue predictive methods take into account the initial measured residual stress values and neglect their evolution under cyclic loading. This assumption is controversial by published data related to stabilized residual stress profiles showing relaxation and redistribution phenomena [2,8,12,13]. Moreover, it has been reported that the most fraction of residual stress relaxation is monotonic, since it occurs at first cycles. Relaxation could progress under cyclic loading if the plastic misfit itself continues to change until stability [13][14][15]. Since the stabilized residual stress state is an important parameter for fatigue life prediction, it is of paramount importance to determine, in this study, the parameters that govern their evolution during cyclic loading. These parameters will be taken into account by the developed numerical procedure to calculate stabilized residual stresses and therefore fatigue life time. Analysis of the residual stress cyclic stability is based on the experimental results of surface characterization and fatigue tests conducted on AISI D2 ground surface and AA 5083-H111 machined and wire brush hammered surfaces.