Deformation and rupture of stainless steel under cyclic, torsional creep

Copyright 2008 @ Engineering Integrity Society.Recent results from a long-term, strain-limited, cyclic creep test program upon stainless steel tubes are given. The test conditions employed were: constant temperature 500 °C, shear stress Ƭ = ± 300 MPa and shear strain limits ƴ = ± 4%. It is believed that a cyclic creep behaviour for the material has been revealed that has not been reported before in the literature. That is, the creep curves for stainless steel under repeated, shear stress reversals shows two basic square root dependencies: one upon time and the other upon cycle number. Consequently, the combined effect is such that the shear creep strain depends upon the square root of the product of cycle number and the time elapsed within that cycle. Despite extended times of cycling, with the test running into a period of over a year, no secondary or tertiary creep stages were ever observed within individual creep curves. Thus both the forward and reversed creep curves were exclusively primary in nature, within which the only visible evidence of a slow degradation of the deforming material was that the creep interval reduced successively between the imposed strain limits. However, it was found that the creep curve, when plotted within axes of cumulative creep strain and time, did recover a "pseudo-tertiary" stage. This stage concords with earlier results that showed tertiary creep to be a dominant contributor to the creep curve for this material under a steady torque. Given either the tensile ductility of the material or, a tensile creep rupture time, it is shown how final failure is predicted from the phenomenological square root law and an equivalence criterion

Creep in fibre-reinforced polymer mat composites

Tensile creeps have been conducted upon a woven, glass-fibre laminated epoxy composite and a 0/90° cross ply, carbon fibre reinforced epoxy composite. For the laminate loading was aligned with a fibre direction. For the ply the loading was inclined to the fibres (off-axis). Testing to stress levels up to 200 MPa and temperatures in the range 20°- 200°C has revealed a form of creep in each material. The creep observed is essentially primary in nature but with extended time •1000 h, it may exhaust or resemble a pseudo-secondary regime with a low rate. Where the load carrying capacity is lost, through fibre breakage or tab slip, the creep rate accelerates suddenly to infinity in a few hours. Smooth creep curves apply to successful tests but many irregular curves resulted from grip failure. A phenomenological approach was used to model smooth curves using a summation of instantaneous, primary and secondary strain terms. For the mat reinforcement a consistent trend was not found between the secondary creep rate and a stress that was raised incrementally upon the same testpiece. However the cumulative instantaneous strain provided the correct elastic modulus. Creep in the solid laminate was believed to be due to a fibre straightening that yielded a limiting strain in a time beyond which the process exhausts. Creep in cfrc was only evident when the fibres were inclined to the stress axis, indicating a viscous flow in the matrix. Moreover, it is believed that a viscous shear sliding between laminates or plies is more likely to contribute to an off-axis deformation mode which is not strain limited.http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/acad/sed/sedstaff/design/DavidRee

The introduction of an holistic design approach through a teaching company scheme

Traditional design approaches separate the various functions of design such as material selection, performance modelling and tolerance specification into discrete entities. Whilst this allows more focused methods to be used at each stage, areas of conflict or benefit may be overlooked, and the designer is left to bring the loose ends together. This paper looks at a synthesis approach that draws upon a number of current design themes. The design process is considered along with various aspects such as product development, design-for-`X' methodologies and material selection. The need for the preservation of design knowledge and reasoning, the so called wh-? questions, within the process are considered along with various models of the design process. The paper draws these various aspects together to form a more holistic approach to design. The application of this technique within the Teaching Company Scheme is briefly discussed

Analysis and modelling of mechanical anchorage of 4D/5D hooked end steel fibres

This paper represents an analytical model to predict the influence of the fibre geometry on the pull-out behaviour of various geometrical hooked end steel fibres. The model is established based on the concept of a frictional pulley along with two, three and four plastic hinges to simulate the mechanical anchorage effect provided by the hook. The mechanical contribution of the hook is a function of the cold work needed to straighten the fibre during the pull-out. The input parameters used in this model are directly related to geometrical and mechanical properties of each fibre. Model predictions are validated against experimental results for single fibre pull-out tests, and very good agreement is shown.The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research of Iraqi Government for this Ph.D. projec

On the effects of friction modelling on small punch creep test responses: a numerical investigation

This paper shows the results of finite element (FE) analyses of Small Punch Creep Testing (SPCT) of a P91 steel at 600°C using two different approaches to model the friction between the specimen and the punch. The numerical results obtained by using the “classical” Coulomb friction model (i.e. constant friction coefficient) have been compared with those obtained by a more modern formulation, which takes into account the effects of local loading conditions, i.e. the contact pressure, between the contacting bodies (the small disc specimen and the punch) on the coefficient of friction. The aim of the work is to investigate the effects of the friction formulation used for the calculations on the numerical results representing the output of the test, i.e. the variation of the punch displacement versus time and the time to rupture. The calculations, carried out for various load levels, showed that the friction coefficient is not constant at all positions on the contacting surface between the punch and the specimen during the deformation process. The maximum value for the coefficient of friction is reached at the contact edge, which is a very important region in the specimen, because this is the position at which most of the creep deformation occurs. As expected, the displacement versus time curve (that is usually the only output obtained from experimental SPCTs) is affected by friction formulation which is used, as this directly influences the stress and strain fields in the specimen

Wireless Sensors for Intraoral Force Monitoring

A device for wireless intraoral forces monitoring is presented. Miniaturized strain gauge sensors are used for the measurements of forces applied by tongue and lips. A sensor interface IC is able to multiplex among four sensors and a low energy transmission module, equipped with an ARM Cortex–M0 core, is used for signal elaboration and remote wireless data transmission using Bluetooth® Low Energy standard protocol. The main novelty rely in the dynamic correction of the output corrupted by the prestrain issue. Moreover, the device shows a reduced dimension and the ability to transmit data wirelessly, without the use of external cables normally used in state-of-the-art intraoral monitoring devices