Prediction of fretting-fatigue crack nucleation using a surface shear - sliding size crack analog parameter

Fretting fatigue is a critical load that appears on many structures, such as the blade/disk contact of aircraft engines, train wheel assemblies, etc. Predicting crack nucleation risk is essential for safety, but is particularly complex. Fretting contact stress is multiaxial, with severe stress gradients. To palliate this difficulty, a common approach consists in computing multiaxial fatigue at a critical distance, thus correcting the stress gradient effect and achieving stable pertinent predictions. However, this strategy is very costly in FEM computation due to very fine FEM mesh size, which may be <10 mu m, and application needs to be limited in large 3D industrial contacts. Investigating the partial slip fretting crack nucleation boundaries of 35NCD16 steel (plane) fretted against 52100 steel cylinders, a new semi-empirical contact loading parameter was introduced, defined as the maximum shear stress generated in the interface (q(max)) multiplied by the square-root of the sliding size (s) of the partial slip interface (i.e., phi = q(max) x root s). Using this very simple parameter inspired by "crack analog strategy", it was found that all the crack nucleation data obtained for a wide spectrum of contact pressures and cylinder radii were aligned along a single master curve. Scatter was very low, even less than for the costly "fatigue-critical distance method". The approach was extended to various fretting-fatigue loading conditions, confirming stability of prediction. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.