A multi-scale approach for high cycle anisotropic fatigue resistance: Application to forged components

Forged components exhibit good mechanical strength, particularly in terms of high cycle fatigue properties. This is due to the specific microstructure resulting from large plastic deformation as in a forging process. The goal of this study is to account for critical phenomena such as the anisotropy of the fatigue resistance in order to perform high cycle fatigue simulations on industrial forged components. Standard high cycle fatigue criteria usually give good results for isotropic behaviors but are not suitable for components with anisotropic features. The aim is to represent explicitly this anisotropy at a lower scale compared to the process scale and determined local coefficients needed to simulate a real case. We developed a multi-scale approach by considering the statistical morphology and mechanical characteristics of the microstructure to represent explicitly each element. From stochastic experimental data, realistic microstructures were reconstructed in order to perform high cycle fatigue simulations on it with different orientations. The meshing was improved by a local refinement of each interface and simulations were performed on each representative elementary volume. The local mechanical anisotropy is taken into account through the distribution of particles. Fatigue parameters identified at the microscale can then be used at the macroscale on the forged component. The linkage of these data and the process scale is the fiber vector and the deformation state, used to calculate global mechanical anisotropy. Numerical results reveal an expected behavior compared to experimental tendencies. We proved numerically the dependence of the anisotropy direction and the deformation state on the endurance limit evolution. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.