Calculating the fatigue life of smooth specimens of two-phase titanium alloys subject to symmetric uniaxial cyclic load of constant amplitude

• Fatigue life calculation with no experimental fatigue data.
• Formula for calculating the initiated crack tip opening displacement.
• Two-phase titanium alloys with three types of microstructure.

A system of microstructure-dependent fatigue failure models that allows calculating the number of stress cycles to failure of smooth specimens in the absence of data on the fatigue resistance of the material is proposed. Fatigue life is represented as the sum of the number of stress cycles to the initiation of a microstructurally short crack with a depth equal to one grain size and the number of stress cycles to the instant the growing physically small and long crack reaches the depth taken as a fatigue failure criterion. To fill the models, it is necessary to test standard specimens under monotonic short-term tension to determine the elastic modulus, Poisson’s ratio, and the proportional limit and to analyze the microstructure and texture of the material to determine the Taylor factor, the magnitude of the Burgers vector, and the distance between neighboring parallel slip planes in the lattice, depending on which slip system is activated relative to the tension direction. The models are applicable to metals and alloys in which a fatigue crack is initiated along a persistent slip band in a surface grain under high-cycle loading. The models are validated against fatigue test data for flat specimens of different two-phase titanium alloys (VT3-1, IMI 834, Ti–6Al–4V, VT6, VT16, VT22, VT23, LCB) with different types of microstructure (bimodal, globular, fine-grained β-transformed) subject to symmetric in-plane bending. The plotted S–N curves are in a satisfactory agreement with experimental data.