Open Access

Ermüdungsrisse gehen in technischen Materialien in der Regel von Werkstoffdefekten auf oder nahe der Oberfläche aus. Bei Schweißverbindungen können Schweißnahtdefekte, z. B. oberflächennahe Schlackeneinschlüsse die Risseinleitungsphase erheblich verkürzen, so dass der Hauptteil der Lebensdauer auf die Phase der Kurzriss- und zu geringerem Anteil auf die Langrissausbreitung entfällt. Bei nichtgeschweißten Bauteilen aus technischen Werkstoffen starten Ermüdungsrisse häufig an Einschlüssen, oberflächennahen Poren oder anderen Ungänzen. Einerseits ermöglicht dies prinzipiell die Anwendung bruchmechanischer Methoden zur Ermittlung der Schwingfestigkeit, andererseits müssen die Methoden in der Lage sein, spezielle Aspekte des Kurzrisswachstums wie den graduellen Aufbau des Rissschließeffekts und die lokale Rissspitzenplastizität zu erfassen. Im Beitrag werden ein geeignetes analytisches Modell sowie erste Validierungen an Proben aus verschiedenen Aluminiumlegierungen vorgestellt. Der abschließende Teil des Beitrags geht auf Besonderheiten von Schweißverbindungen (Schweißnahtdefekte, Eigenspannungen etc.) im Kontext des vorgestellten Modells ein. Eine Erweiterung des Modells für Schweißverbindungen aus Stahl wird im Rahmen eines kürzlich gestarteten DFG-AiF-Clusterprojekts erfolgen.

The 21st century brought new and complex technological challenges, which need to be solved. Of primary importance is the global energy transition that pushes forward the research and innovation in order to achieve the goal of replacing the existing non-renewable energy sources with new renewable and efficient ones, with positive effects on the world climate. In many countries worldwide mid- and long-term goals have been set out in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. Germany, among others, intends to reduce the emissions by 80 to 95% within 2050, compared with 1990 levels. The achievement of this goal is aimed to be realized by the development of new and more efficient energy sources, but also by substantial investments in electromobility (the goal is to bring one million electrically driven vehicles onto German streets by 2020). Another important challenge came into play following the global financial crisis, which pushed many industries to reduce their operational and maintenance costs. In particular, the life-cycle management of a component has become of primary importance. In some cases it has been shown that the underestimation or the lack of awareness in ageing of plants led to incidents due to the loss of technical integrity. Other studies demonstrated that the component life of many of the long-life components could be extended up to 50% without compromising safety. The third, not less important, challenge is driven by the development of new technologies and materials. The trends show a large investment in additive manufactured metal components and new metallic materials which have to assure longer in-service life, lightweighting and efficient recycling. This works aims at addressing part of these problems by proposing a fracture mechanics-based analytical procedure for the determination of the fatigue lives of engineering components and particularly of welded joints. In fact, an analytical tool, which is able to simulate the main failure mechanisms of weldments under fatigue loading, brings many advantages: i) drastic reduction of long and expensive experimental tests; ii) optimization of the geometry and production processes (possible weight reduction); iii) better estimate of the safety margins used in the design of the components (life extension without safety issues). The results show that the model can fairly well predict the lives of the welded joints investigated experimentally, irrespective of the geometry and loading conditions.

The fatigue assessment of welded joints requires several input data, which can be subdivided into three categories: geometry, material and loading. The number of input data depends essentially on the complexity of the models employed and on the level of accuracy of the analysis. It is common practice to use safety factors in design to account for the scatter of the input parameters. Nevertheless, overly-conservative factors lead often to unrealistic estimations of fatigue life. This work presents a fracture mechanics-based model for the structural integrity assessment of welded joints under constant amplitude fatigue loading, in which the local geometry at the weld toe and the fatigue crack growth properties are considered statistically distributed. The approach is validated against a large number of experimental data.

An analytical fracture mechanics model for predicting the finite life fatigue strength of components is presented which Combines a number of well established and newly developed approaches such as Murakami’s and McEvily's approach for describing the transient behaviour of crack closure of short cracks, the analytical (long) crack closure function of Newman, the R6 procedure modified by a method for improving the ligament yielding correction proposed by the authors and other elements. Basic assumption is the preexistence of initial flaws such that the crack initiation or nucleation stage is small and can be neglected. The application of the model is demonstrated for small tension plates of aluminium Al 5380 H321 with artificial initial defects generated by FIB technology, the size of which was fixed on the basis of fractographic investigations on broken, smooth specimens.