Damage accumulation near a hole under low cycle fatigue proceeding from measurements of local deformation response

A new destructive method for quantitative determination of the damage accumulation in the vicinity of a stress concentrator has been proposed and verified. Increase of damage degree in local area with a high level of the strain gradient was achieved through preliminary low-cycle pull-push loading of plane specimens with central open holes. The above procedure is performed for three programs at the same stress range (333.3 MPa) and different stress ratio values 0.33, – 0.66 and – 1.0, and vice versa for two programs at the same stress ratio – 0.33 and different stress range 333.3 and 233.3 MPa. This process offers a set of the objects to be considered with different degree of accumulated fatigue damages. The key point of the developed approach consists in the fact that plane specimens with open holes are tested under real operation conditions without a preliminary notching of the specimen initiating the fatigue crack growth. The measured parameters necessary for a quantitative description of the damage accumulation process were obtained by removing the local volume of the material in the form of a sequence of narrow notches at a constant level of external tensile stress. External load can be considered an amplifier enhancing a useful signal responsible for revealing the material damage. The notch is intended for assessing the level of fatigue damage, just as probe holes are used to release residual stress energy in the hole drilling method. Measurements of the deformation response caused by local removing of the material are carried out by electronic speckle-pattern interferometry at different stages of low-cycle fatigue. The transition from measured in-plane displacements to the values of the stress intensity factor (SIF) and the T-stress was carried out on the basis of the relations of linear fracture mechanics. It was shown that the normalized dependences of the stress intensity factor on the durability percentage for the first notch (constructed for four programs of cyclic loading with different parameters), reflect the effect of the stress ratio and stress range of the loading cycle on the rate of damage accumulation. The data were used to obtain the explicit form of the damage accumulation function that quantitatively describes damage accumulation process. The functions were constructed for different stress ratios and stress ranges.