Materials Science and Engineering A 462 (2007) 359362

Quantitative fractography in bending-torsion fatigue

Karel Sl me ka a , Petr Ponzil b , Jaroslav Pokluda c, a c
b

Department of Materials, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, United Kingdom Department of Physics and Materials Engineering, Tomas Bata University in Zlin, sq. TGM 588, 76272 Zlin, Czech Republic c Institute of Engineering Physics, Brno University of Technology, Technick 2, 61669 Brno, Czech Republic a Received 30 August 2005; received in revised form 26 February 2006; accepted 2 March 2006

Abstract The paper deals with a quantitative analysis of fracture surface roughness generated under combined bending-torsion fatigue in a high-strength low-alloy steel. Changes in several amplitude, spectral and hybrid prole roughness parameters are investigated for sets of proles parallel and perpendicular to the local crack propagation direction in dependence on the loading ratio. Prole fractal dimension is also calculated as a scaleindependent characteristic. Most of prole roughness parameters start to rapidly increase above the critical value rc 0.5 of the loading ratio r = a /( a + a ), where a is the bending amplitude and a is the torsion amplitude. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Quantitative fractography; Roughness; Biaxial fatigue; Fractal dimension

1. Introduction It was pointed out by many researches that the fracture surface morphology plays a very important role in the analysis of fatigue crack propagation [17]. The surface roughness is usually extremely enhanced when applying a high portion of a lower to medium amplitudes of shear loading modes II and III [3]. In such cases the crack usually propagates in an extremely complicated manner making local arrests and forming branch/twist crack morphology or the so-called factory roof. On the contrary, a high amount of opening loading mode reduces the surface interaction, which leads to a visually at fracture surface appearance. A qualitatively similar result is produced by an intensive friction when applying a high-amplitude shear in modes II and III [1,2]. The effort to approach the fractography (and the roughness) in a more quantitative way has led to many interesting studies on the interconnection between the morphology and loading or ambient environment (e.g. [510]). Nevertheless, an unambiguous characterisation of the roughness remains still an unrealised goal [10]. It seems that in order to assess the roughness more precisely a rather high number of parameters is to be determined to identify those yielding the best information in each particular case [1014]. However, the most crucial problem in

the quantitative fractography remains to be a signicant lack of experimental data from fracture surfaces created by multiaxial loading. To authors knowledge, detailed reports on quantitative analyses of roughness generated under biaxial fatigue have not been published hitherto. The current study is intended to ll the gap by reporting several types of roughness parameters characterising the morphology variation produced by a combined bendingtorsion (biaxial) loading. Here a special attention is focused on the effect of torsion (shear) loading component on roughness characteristics. Results of investigations of the variation of roughness parameters with the distance from the crack initiation site as well as of the 3D micromorphology of factory roofs were published elsewhere [15,16]. 2. Experimental procedure Five smooth specimens of a high strength low-alloy steel (ultimate tensile stress u = 950 MPa, yield strength y = 840 MPa) were fatigued until nal rapture. Symmetric (R = 1) bending and torsion loading (the frequency of 29 Hz) were applied at the room temperature. The experiments were conducted using the fatigue test machine MZGS-100. Loading settings and achieved fatigue life data are collected in Table 1, where a is the bending amplitude, a the torsion amplitude, r is the loading parameter dened as r = a /( a + a ) and Nf is the number of cycles to failure. For all investigated specimens

Corresponding author. Tel.: +420 541 142 827; fax: +420 541 142 842. E-mail address: pokluda@fme.vutbr.cz (J. Pokluda).

0921-5093/$ see front matter 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.msea.2006.03.153

360 Table 1 Experimental data Specimen 1 2 3 4 5 Pure bending Combined bending-torsion Pure torsion

K. Sl me ka et al. / Materials Science and Engineering A 462 (2007) 359362 a c

a (MPa) 738.00 559.86 329.37 135.95 0

a (MPa) 0 203,38 330,30 372,82 399.00

r 0.00 0.27 0.50 0.73 1.00

Nf (cycles) 102,560 14,880 68,400 100,160 100,400

all analysed areas: the rst one in the crack propagation direction (y-direction in Fig. 1) and the second one in the perpendicular direction (x-direction in Fig. 1) marking thus different positions of the progressing crack front. Several types of roughness parameters were adopted. Prole amplitude parameters inuenced only by changes in the vertical z-co-ordinate are represented here by the vertical prole range Rz (the difference between the highest and the lowest prole points), and by the arithmetic roughness Ra . The latter quantity, also known as the centre line average, is dened as Ra = 1 N
N

the fatigue life of Nf (104 , 105 ) cycles lies within a transition region between the high-cycle and the low-cycle fatigue. The differences in the fatigue life are small enough to enable a mutual comparison of fracture morphologies of the investigated specimens. Topographical 3D data of selected parts on each fracture surface were obtained by means of stereophotogrammetry (e.g. [17,18]) using the scanning electron microscope for the acquirement of stereopairs and the commercial software package MeX for their subsequent processing. Output digital elevation model (DEM) data les consisted of up to 300,000 non-equidistantly localised points. For each specimen the square area of size 0.25 mm2 was chosen with its centre at the distance of 0.8 mm from the fatigue crack initiation site on the specimen surface. After a careful microscopic examination, square sites were oriented parallel with (or perpendicular to) the local direction of the fatigue crack propagation (Fig. 1). Using Delaunay triangulation, two sets, each consisting of 100 proles, were traced for

(zi z ),
i=1

(1)

where N is the number of valid data points and z is the mean height value. Other determined amplitude parameters, the skewness and the kurtosis, did not reveal any connection to the loading mode and their values seemed to be more or less random. Hybrid parameters affected by both the asperity amplitudes and spacing are represented by linear roughness RL [11] as the ratio of the true prole length L and its projected length L : RL = L . L (2)

The spectral character of proles was evaluated using the elevation power spectrum density (EPSD) curves calculated via a fast Fourier transformation (FFT) algorithm. Each EPSD curve constitutes prole transformation to the frequency space [10].

Fig. 1. Analysed areas(a) the pure bending: r = 0, (b) r = 0.27, (c) r = 0.50, (d) r = 0.73 and (e) the pure torsion: r = 1. Each image represents a 0.5 mm 0.5 mm area of fracture surface with its centre located at the distance of 0.8 mm from the fatigue crack initiation site on the specimen surface.

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Fig. 2. Roughness characteristics in the direction perpendicular to the local crack propagation direction. (a) The vertical range Rz ; (b) the arithmetic roughness Ra .

Fig. 3. Linear roughness RL of proles perpendicular and parallel to the local crack propagation direction.

A self-similarity of fracture morphology can be quantied, for example, by its linear fractal dimension DL by measuring the dependence: RL () = C0 (DL 1) (3)

where is the used measurement unit and C0 is the dimensionless constant. Before the calculation of roughness parameters, each prole was smoothed in a spatial domain using the mean ltering with three-element kernel to reduce errors possibly introduced by the stereophotogrammetrical reconstruction [17,18]. EPSD curves were calculated using original unltered proles rearranged to obtain equidistant data sets required by the FFT algorithm. 3. Results and discussion The vertical range Rz parameter for proles perpendicular to the crack propagation direction (x-direction) is shown in Fig. 2a. The proles in the y-direction exhibited a very similar geometry. Curves for particular specimens are labelled by the loading ratio r, see Table 1. As expected, the highest Rz values and highest oscillations in both directions are achieved for specimens 4 and 5. Despite of visual differences, the parameter Rz becomes nearly the same value for specimens 13 (r 0.5). Although Ra

is expected to be much less sensitive to extremes than Rz , both these characteristics reveal similar behaviour as can be seen from Fig. 2b (x-direction). Again, there was no signicant difference between proles in the x- and y-direction. The highest value of the parameter RL is achieved for the specimen 4 followed, most frequently, by the specimen 5, as shown in Fig. 3. The linear roughness RL demonstrates a

Fig. 4. EPSD curves averaged for proles parallel to the local crack propagation direction, and passing through the middle of analysed areas. Polynomial tting curves are shown as well.

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K. Sl me ka et al. / Materials Science and Engineering A 462 (2007) 359362 a c

Fig. 5. Examples of fractal charts in the crack propagation direction. (a) The dependence of the linear roughness RL on the measuring scale (sigmoidal tting curves are shown as well); (b) the fractal dimension DL .

different character of proles taken in x- and y-direction. There are distinct increasing trends for specimens 13 and 5 and a decreasing trend for specimen 4 in the x-direction, contrary to more or less random values for proles taken perpendicularly to the crack front. The higher sensitivity is probably caused by the fact, that the parameter RL reects both the vertical heights and the spatial connections of surface points. Due to the extremely time-consuming analysis, EPSD curves were calculated for only ve proles passing through the middle of each area. Averaged EPSD curves for the y-direction are shown as grey oscillating curves together with their exponential ttings in Fig. 4. All tting curves are found to be almost parallel for spatial wavelengths in the range of 3090 m with the highest energy for the specimen 4. For higher spatial frequencies, the highest energies correspond to specimens 4 and 5 (r 0.5). Proles taken in the x-direction did not reveal any signicant difference. Examples of fractal plots are shown in Fig. 5a and b. The three different proles, exhibiting a typical sigmoidal curvature [12], are oriented perpendicularly to the crack propagation direction and located at y = 0, e.g. on the bottom edges of Fig. 1(a), (c) and (e). Eq. (3) is fullled in the range of (2, 10) m for the prole from the specimen 1, and in a wider range of (2, 20) m for proles of specimens 3 and 5. Similar behaviour can be expected also for specimens 2 and 4. Values of DL were extracted as a linear t of log RL log dependencies in the range of (2, 10) m. Fractal dimension values are shown for y-direction in Fig. 5b and resemble the RL -curves in Fig. 3. Again, both specimens 4 and 5 (r 0.5) reveal the highest geometrical tortuosity from the fractal point of view. The curves for the x-direction were qualitatively similar but quantitatively slightly different. 4. Conclusion The quantitative study of biaxial-fatigued fracture surfaces roughness yielded the following main results: (i) Results conrm the great inuence of torsion loading component on the surface topography. The critical value of the loading ration rc 0.5 can clearly be distinguished.

For loadings of r < 0.5 (the bending prevails), the surface roughness remains nearly on the same level. Once the critical value is exceeded (torsion prevails), the fatigue crack propagates in much more complicated manner resulting in a distinctly higher surface roughness. (ii) Some of studied roughness parameters, namely the hybrid linear roughness RL and the linear fractal dimension DL , have shown a good sensitivity to the prole orientation. This is assumed to be caused by their dependence on both amplitude and spacing of the asperities. Acknowledgement The research was supported by the Czech Science Foundation in the frame of the project no. 106/05/0055. References
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