chapter2overviewofstressintensityfactoranditsestimation.PDFVIP

28 CHAPTER2 OVERVIEW OF STRESS INTENSITYFACTOR AND ITS ESTIMATION BY DISTRIBUTED DISLOCATION METHOD 2.1 INTRODUCTION An important topic currently facing researchers is the propagation of short fatigue cracks (Abdel-Raouf et al1991), since their behavior is life- determining for most components. Short fatigue cracks behave in a different manner to their long counter-parts and this has been attributed to microstructural and closure effects (OConnor and Plumtree 1987). Crack growth equations(based on the stress intensity as a crack driving parameter) tend to underestimate the propagation rates of small cracks. Kitagawa and Takahashi (1976), first showed that for short cracks less than a critical size(a ), the threshold stress range approached that of the smooth bar 0 fatigue limit. Several researchers (Tanaka et al (1984), Romaniv et al (1982) Lankford 1982) showed that this critical crack size (below which the threshold stress intensity is no longer constant with crack size) depended upon the microstructure and testing conditions. El-Haddad et al (1979) proposed an empirical intrinsic parameter to explain the variation of threshold stress range with crack length. 29 According to Rajasekaran et al (2006), biaxial fatigue experiment is described which is capable of simulating the loading experienced by a dovetail blade root in an aircraft gas turbine.A comprehensive stress analysis of the experimental configuration has been undertaken and a semi-analytical ap