ELASTO PLASTIC FRACTURE AND FATIGUE SIMULATION USING FEMIXFEM

Abstract

The numerical simulation of crack closure is employed to assist on the prediction of crack growth rate. Under fatigue load, the stress-strain response of metals is altered due to cyclic loading. From numerical simulations, it was observed that simple material models do not provide accurate data for long crack lengths. The interaction effects (crack arrest/acceleration) for long crack length simulation are specially highlighted. For this purpose, the analysis of Zircaloy-2 should be performed experimentally and numerically in order to measure crack closure, and then, those data will be used to predict fatigue crack growth rate under different patterns of overload. Simulation of fatigue analysis of standard specimen made of zircaloy-2 has been carried out using ANSYS. In this analysis fatigue behavior and fatigue life of material Zircaloy-2 have been obtained and plotted. This result shows that the fatigue life decreases abruptly due to the presence of notch. We have compared the plot of S-N curve for different processing materials of Zircaloy-2 for notched specimen and un-notched specimen both. For different conditions of crack length and specimen width ratio, i-integral and stress intensity factor has been estimated by using computational software ABAQUS. Crack growth has been also estimated and load-displacement curve has been obtained.