Multiaxial Fatigue of 16MnR Steel

Uniaxial, torsion, and axial-torsion fatigue experiments were conducted on a pressure vessel steel, 16MnR, in ambient air. The uniaxial experiments were conducted using solid cylindrical specimens. Axial-torsion experiments employed thin-walled tubular specimens subjected to proportional and nonproportional loading. The true fracture stress and strain were obtained by testing solid shafts under monotonic torsion. Experimental results reveal that the material under investigation does not display significant nonproportional hardening. The material was found to display shear cracking under pure shear loading but tensile cracking under tension-compression loading. Two critical plane multiaxial fatigue criteria, namely, the Fatemi–Socie criterion and the Jiang criterion, were evaluated based on the experimental results. The Fatemi–Socie criterion combines the maximum shear strain amplitude with a consideration of the normal stress on the critical plane. The Jiang criterion makes use of the plastic strain energy on a material plane as the major contributor to the fatigue damage. Both criteria were found to correlate well with the experiments in terms of fatigue life. The predicted cracking directions by the criteria were less satisfactory when comparing with the experimentally observed cracking behavior under different loading conditions.