Fretting fatigue experiments and analyses with a spherical contact in combination with constant bulk stress

A fretting experiment with separate control of bulk stress, normal and tangential contact loads is presented. For the initial test series, constant normal and bulk loads were combined with a cyclic tangential load. Both the spherical indenter and the plane specimen were manufactured from α+β titanium alloys. Strain gauges and acoustic emission measurements were employed for the determination of the time to crack initiation and the propagation life. The fretting cracks always initiated inside the slip zone at positions that were spread over the whole slip zone. Crack nucleation was investigated with five multiaxial fatigue criteria. It was concluded that macroscale stresses from the contact and bulk load alone could not explain all aspects of crack initiation. A possible explanation was found in the fretting-induced roughness. The growth of the fretting crack was simulated numerically by a parametrical description. It was noted that a cyclic bulk load was required to drive the crack growth through the specimen to final failure.