Crack Tip Radius Effect on Fatigue Crack Growth and Near Tip Fields in Plastically Compressible Materials

S. Singh; D. Khan

doi:10.14429/dsj.71.15983

S. Singh Department of Mechanical Engineering, Uttaranchal Institute of Technology, Uttaranchal University, Dehradun - 248 007 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7686-847X
D. Khan Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi - 221 005 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9171-7063

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14429/dsj.71.15983

Keywords: Finite deformation, FCG, Mode I crack, Plastic compressibility, Crack-tip radius, Strain softening

Abstract

Motivated by the prospective uses of plastically compressible materials such as, metallic and polymeric foams, transformation toughened ceramics, toughened structural polymers etc., the present authors investigate the crack-tip radius effect on fatigue crack growth (FCG) of a mode I crack and near-tip stress-strain fields in such plastically compressible solids. These plastically compressible materials have been characterised by elastic-viscoplastic constitutive equations. Simulations are conducted for plane strain geometry with two different hardness functions: one is bilinear hardening and the other one is hardening-softening-hardening. It has been observed that plastic compressibility as well as strain softening lead to significant deviation in the amount of crack growth. It has further been revealed that the nature of FCG is appreciably affected by initial crack-tip radius. Even though it may look from outside that the increase in tip radius will lead to decrease in FCG, but the nature of FCG variation with respect to tip radius is found to be a combined effect of tip radius, plastic compressibility and work or strain softening etc.