Research Article
A Modified Fatigue Damage Model for
High-Cycle Fatigue Life Prediction
Meng Wang,
1,2
Qingguo Fei,
1,2
and Peiwei Zhang
1,2
1
Department of Engineering Mechanics, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
2
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Engineering Mechanics, Nanjing 210096, China
Correspondence should be addressed to Qingguo Fei; qgfei@seu.edu.cn
Received 15 November 2015; Revised 17 January 2016; Accepted 20 January 2016
Academic Editor: Konstantinos G. Anthymidis
Copyright © 2016 Meng Wang et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Based on the assumption of quasibrittle failure under high-cycle fatigue for the metal material, the damage constitutive equation
and the modifed damage evolution equation are obtained with continuum damage mechanics. Ten, fnite element method (FEM)
is used to describe the failure process of metal material. Te increment of specimen’s life and damage state can be researched
using damage mechanics-FEM. Finally, the lifetime of the specimen is got at the given stress level. Te damage mechanics-FEM is
inserted into ABAQUS with subroutine USDFLD and the Python language is used to simulate the fatigue process of titanium alloy
specimens. Te simulation results have a good agreement with the testing results under constant amplitude loading, which proves
the accuracy of the method.
1. Introduction
Fatigue failure, as one of the major causes of damage for
the mechanical components, relates to alternative loads
subjected on engineering structures, which drew increasingly
researching work focusing on the fatigue life prediction.
Tere are two methods to forecast the structure fatigue life:
one is fatigue safe life prediction based on fatigue cumulative
damage theories and the other is damage tolerance method
based on fracture mechanics [1]. In general, the fatigue life of
material is estimated based on the damage tolerance method.
However, a high proportion of the overall lifetime for the
metal high-cycle fatigue is the fatigue initiation life [2].
Damage mechanics is the theory studying the mecha-
nisms and rules of solid material degradation performance by
changing mechanical variables under the external loads. As
an important branch of damage mechanics, the continuum
damage mechanics [3–5] is a theory based on continuum
mechanics and irreversible thermodynamics. Terefore, the
process of fatigue crack initiation and development can
be analyzed by the fatigue life prediction model based on
continuum damage mechanics. And the model of fatigue
damage can be classifed briefy into ductile fatigue dam-
age model [6] and brittle fatigue damage model [7, 8].
Considering that the metal subjected to high-cycle fatigue
could be regarded as quasibrittle material, the brittle damage
mechanism is ofen employed to build a damage propagation
model on the basis of irreversible thermodynamics [8], which
is broadly accepted in engineering practices on account
of less parameters of evolution equations. Moreover, the
damage numerical analysis method is another core element
of damage mechanics. Te determination of damage feld and
the forecast of fatigue life have been achieved by the damage
mechanics-fnite element method [9–11], which can be uti-
lized to obtain the lifetime of damage initiation and damage
propagation path.
In this study, a brittle fatigue damage model is modifed
and combined with a damage constitutive model to predict
the fatigue life of the metal material in Section 2. Te method
to estimate fatigue lifetime of titanium alloy components is
accomplished by the commercial sofware ABAQUS which
is developed by programming in Python and Fortran in
Section 3. Ten, the correctness of the fatigue damage model,
the fnite element model, and the simulation method is
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Advances in Materials Science and Engineering
Volume 2016, Article ID 2193684, 7 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/2193684