Energy-based method for analyzing fatigue properties of additively manufactured AlSi10Mg

This study focuses on analyzing the thermal response induced by the self-heating effect during cyclic loading of additively manufactured (AM) specimens made from AlSi10Mg aluminum alloy and on its correlation with their fatigue life performance. Four different specimen designs were tested to assess the applicability of various thermographic methods for predicting the fatigue response. These methods focus on estimating the fatigue limit (the Luong method and its versions) or the S-N curve (the Fargione method) from the temperature response of one specimen which is loaded on multiple subsequently increasing levels of the stress amplitude. Such methods could reduce the costs of fatigue experiments by speeding up the estimation of fatigue life performance. The analyses documented in this paper show their large potential (above all in the case of the Fargione method), but also their weaknesses and the need for a more rigorous and broader validation on new experimental data.