Crystal Plasticity Simulation of Ti-6Al-4V Under Fretting Fatigue

Fretting fatigue is often the root cause of the nucleation of cracks at attachments of structural components. Since fretting fatigue damage accumulation occurs over relatively small volumes, the subsurface cyclic plastic strain is expected to be rather non-uniformly distributed in polycrystalline materials. The scale of the cyclic plasticity and the damage process zones is often on the order of microstructure dimensions. Fretting damage analyses using cyclic crystal plasticity constitutive models have the potential to account for the influence of size, morphology, and crystallographic orientation of grains on fretting damage evolution. Two-dimensional plane strain simulations of fretting fatigue are performed using the cyclic properties of Ti-6Al-4V. The crystal plasticity simulations are compared to an initially isotropic J(2) theory with nonlinear kinematic hardening as well as to experiments. The influence of initially isotropic versus textured microstructure in the presence of crystallographic slip is studied.