AN ENTROPIC THEORY OF DAMAGE WITH APPLICATIONS TO CORROSION-FATIGUE STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY ASSESSMENT

This dissertation demonstrates an explanation of damage and reliability of critical components and structures within the second law of thermodynamics. The approach relies on the fundamentals of irreversible thermodynamics, specifically the concept of entropy generation due to materials degradation as an index of damage. All failure mechanisms that cause degradation, damage accumulation and ultimate failure share a common feature, namely energy dissipation. Energy dissipation, as a fundamental measure for irreversibility in a thermodynamic treatment of non-equilibrium processes, leads to and can be expressed in terms of entropy generation. The dissertation proposes a theory of damage by relating entropy generation to energy dissipation via generalized thermodynamic forces and thermodynamic fluxes that formally describes the resulting damage. Following the proposed theory of entropic damage, an approach to reliability and integrity characterization based on thermodynamic entropy is discussed. It is shown that the variability in the amount of the thermodynamic-based damage and uncertainties about the parameters of a distribution model describing the variability, leads to a more consistent and broader definition of the well know time-to-failure distribution in reliability engineering. As such it has been shown that the reliability function can be derived from the thermodynamic laws rather than estimated from the observed failure histories. Furthermore, using the superior advantages of the use of entropy generation and accumulation as a damage index in comparison to common observable markers of damage such as crack size, a method is proposed to explain the prognostics and health management (PHM) in terms of the entropic damage. The proposed entropic-based damage theory to reliability and integrity is then demonstrated through experimental validation. Using this theorem, the corrosion-fatigue entropy generation function is derived, evaluated and employed for structural integrity, reliability assessment and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of Aluminum 7075-T651 specimens tested

A Thermodynamic Entropy Approach to Reliability Assessment with Applications to Corrosion Fatigue

This paper outlines a science-based explanation of damage and reliability of critical components and structures within the second law of thermodynamics. The approach relies on the fundamentals of irreversible thermodynamics, specifically the concept of entropy generation as an index of degradation and damage in materials. All damage mechanisms share a common feature, namely energy dissipation. Dissipation, a fundamental measure for irreversibility in a thermodynamic treatment of non-equilibrium processes, is quantified by entropy generation. An entropic-based damage approach to reliability and integrity characterization is presented and supported by experimental validation. Using this theorem, which relates entropy generation to dissipative phenomena, the corrosion fatigue entropy generation function is derived, evaluated, and employed for structural integrity and reliability assessment of aluminum 7075-T651 specimens

Multiaxial Fatigue Spectrum Editing by Using Combined Wavelet Analysis and Stress Invariant Approach

The practicalities of structural fatigue testing limit the fidelity of the cyclic load history that can be applied to a test structure. Testing is, therefore, a compromise between fatigue damage fidelity and test economy. A new methodology is proposed for multiaxial loading spectrum editing to extract cycles that contribute negligible damage during fatigue crack initiation. The method is based on projection by projection (PbP) technique and wavelet transform analysis (WTA) procedure. In this approach, the cycles with negligible contribution to damage in every decoupled projected loading path (i.e. obtained from PbP approach) are extracted using the WTA procedure. Each extracted segment is then replaced with an equivalent cycle that produces the same amount of damage. The effectiveness of the edited spectrums is evaluated by the degree of fatigue damage retention as the original damage and preservation of statistical parameter values. As a case study, the proposed approach has been applied to the numerically produced random bending-torsion fatigue spectrum in plane-stress condition. The result shows an average of 75% reduction of the original spectrums with retention of 90% of the original spectrums’ damage values

Multiaxial high-cycle fatigue modelling for random loading

In this paper, a multiaxial fatigue life prediction model is proposed under general multiaxial random loadings. First, a brief review for existing multiaxial fatigue models is given and special focus is on the LiuMahadevan critical plane concept, which can be applied to both brittle and ductile materials. Next, new model development based on the Liu-Mahadevan critical plane concept for random loading is presented. The key concept is to use two-steps to identify the critical plane: identify the maximum damage plane due to normal stress and calculate the critical plane orientation with respect to the maximum damage plane due to normal stress. Multiaxial rain-flow cycle counting method with mean stress correction is used to estimate the damage on the critical plane. Equivalent stress transformation is proposed to convert the multiaxial random load spectrum to an equivalent constant amplitude spectrum. The equivalent stress is used for fatigue life prediction. Following this, experimental design and testing is performed for Al 7075-T6 under various different random uniaxial and multiaxial spectrums. The developed model is validated with both literature and in-house testing data. Very good agreement is observed for the investigated material. Finally, conclusion and future work is given based on the proposed study