Review of Multiaxial Testing for Very High Cycle Fatigue: From ‘Conventional’ To Ultrasonic Machines

Fatigue is one of the main causes for in service failure of mechanical components and structures. With the development of new materials, such as high strength aluminium or titanium alloys with different microstructures from steels, materials no longer have a fatigue limit in the classical sense, where it was accepted that they would have ‘infinite life’ from 10 million (107) cycles. The emergence of new materials used in critical mechanical parts, including parts obtained from metal additive manufacturing (AM), the need for weight reduction and the ambition to travel greater distances in shorter periods of time, have brought many challenges to design engineers, since they demand predictability of material properties and that they are readily available. Most fatigue testing today still uses uniaxial loads. However, it is generally recognised that multiaxial stresses occur in many full-scale structures, being rare the occurrence of pure uniaxial stress states. By combining both Ultrasonic Fatigue Testing with multiaxial testing through Single-Input-Multiple-Output Modal Analysis, the high costs of both equipment and time to conduct experiments have seen a massive improvement. It is nowadays possible to test materials under multiaxial loading conditions and for very high number of cycles in a fraction of the time compared to non-ultrasonic fatigue testing methods (days compared to months or years). This work presents the current status of ultrasonic fatigue testing machines working at a frequency of 20 kHz to date, with emphasis on multiaxial fatigue and very high cycle fatigue. Special attention will be put into the performance of multiaxial fatigue tests of classical cylindrical specimens under tension/torsion and flat cruciform specimens under in-plane bi-axial testing using low cost piezoelectric transducers. Together with the description of the testing machines and associated instrumentation, some experimental results of fatigue tests are presented in order to demonstrate how ultrasonic fatigue testing can be used to determine the behaviour of a steel alloy from a railway wheel at very high cycle fatigue regime when subjected to multiaxial tension/torsion loadings

Review of Multiaxial Testing for Very High Cycle Fatigue: From ‘Conventional’ to Ultrasonic Machines

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Fatigue is one of the main causes for in service failure of mechanical components and structures. With the development of new materials, such as high strength aluminium or titanium alloys with different microstructures from steels, materials no longer have a fatigue limit in the classical sense, where it was accepted that they would have ‘infinite life’ from 10 million (107) cycles. The emergence of new materials used in critical mechanical parts, including parts obtained from metal additive manufacturing (AM), the need for weight reduction and the ambition to travel greater distances in shorter periods of time, have brought many challenges to design engineers, since they demand predictability of material properties and that they are readily available. Most fatigue testing today still uses uniaxial loads. However, it is generally recognised that multiaxial stresses occur in many full-scale structures, being rare the occurrence of pure uniaxial stress states. By combining both Ultrasonic Fatigue Testing with multiaxial testing through Single-Input-Multiple-Output Modal Analysis, the high costs of both equipment and time to conduct experiments have seen a massive improvement. It is presently possible to test materials under multiaxial loading conditions and for a very high number of cycles in a fraction of the time compared to non-ultrasonic fatigue testing methods (days compared to months or years). This work presents the current status of ultrasonic fatigue testing machines working at a frequency of 20 kHz to date, with emphasis on multiaxial fatigue and very high cycle fatigue. Special attention will be put into the performance of multiaxial fatigue tests of classical cylindrical specimens under tension/torsion and flat cruciform specimens under in-plane bi-axial testing using low cost piezoelectric transducers. Together with the description of the testing machines and associated instrumentation, some experimental results of fatigue tests are presented in order to demonstrate how ultrasonic fatigue testing can be used to determine the behaviour of a steel alloy from a railway wheel at very high cycle fatigue regime when subjected to multiaxial tension/torsion loadings.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Proceedings of Abstracts Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference 2019

© 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For further details please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Note: Keynote: Fluorescence visualisation to evaluate effectiveness of personal protective equipment for infection control is © 2019 Crown copyright and so is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Under this licence users are permitted to copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information; adapt the Information; exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application. Where you do any of the above you must acknowledge the source of the Information in your product or application by including or linking to any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and, where possible, provide a link to this licence: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/This book is the record of abstracts submitted and accepted for presentation at the Inaugural Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference held 17th April 2019 at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK. This conference is a local event aiming at bringing together the research students, staff and eminent external guests to celebrate Engineering and Computer Science Research at the University of Hertfordshire. The ECS Research Conference aims to showcase the broad landscape of research taking place in the School of Engineering and Computer Science. The 2019 conference was articulated around three topical cross-disciplinary themes: Make and Preserve the Future; Connect the People and Cities; and Protect and Care