Uniaxial ratcheting and fatigue failure of tempered 42CrMo steel: Damage evolution and damage-coupled visco-plastic constitutive model

Uniaxial ratcheting and fatigue failure of tempered 42CrMo steel were observed by the tests under the uniaxial stress-controlled cyclic loading with non-zero mean stress [G.Z. Kang, Y.J. Liu, Mater. Sci. Eng. A 472 (2008) 258–268]. Based on the obtained experimental results, the evolution features of whole-life ratcheting behavior and low-cycle fatigue (LCF) damage of the material were discussed first. Then, in the framework of unified visco-plasticity and continuum damage mechanics, a damage-coupled visco-plastic cyclic constitutive model was proposed to simulate the whole-life ratcheting and predict the fatigue failure life of the material presented in the uniaxial stress cycling with non-zero mean stress. In the proposed model, the damage was divided into two parts, i.e., elastic damage and plastic damage, which were described by the evolution equations with the same form but different constants, since the maximum applied stresses in most of loading cases were lower than the nominal yielding strength of the material. The ratcheting of the material was still described by employing a nonlinear kinematic hardening rule based on the Abdel-Karim–Ohno combined kinematic hardening model [M. Abdel Karim, N. Ohno, Int. J. Plast. 16 (2000) 225–240] but extended by considering the effect of damage. The maximum strain criterion combined with an elastic damage threshold was employed to determine the failure life of the material caused by two different failure modes, i.e., fatigue failure (caused by low-cycle fatigue due to plastic shakedown) and ductile failure (caused by large ratcheting strain). The simulated whole-life ratcheting behavior and predicted failure life of tempered 42CrMo steel are in a fairly good agreement with the experimental ones.