Issue 16

L. Susmel, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 16 (2011) 5-17; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.16.01 7 where  A and  A are the endurance limits extrapolated at N A cycles to failure under fully-reversed uniaxial and torsional fatigue loading, respectively. When our criterion is specifically used to estimate high-cycle fatigue damage, according to the MWCM’s philosophy, a material is at the endurance limit condition when the amplitude of the shear stress relative to the critical plane,  a , equals the reference shear stress estimated, through Eq. (3), for the pertinent value of ratio  eff , that is [11]:           A eff A A eff f a        2 ) ( Re A eff A A a eqA                  2 , (6) If the above equation is plotted in a  a vs.  eff diagram (Fig. 1b), it is straightforward to see that, given the value of  eff , fatigue breakage should not occur up to a number of cycles to failure equal to N A as long as the shear stress amplitude relative to the critical plane is below the limit curve determined according to the criterion itself. (a) (b) Figure 1 : Modified Wöhler diagram (a) and adopted correction for the  A,Ref vs.  eff relationship (b) . To conclude, it is worth observing that, as shown by the above chart, the reference shear stress to be used to estimate multiaxial fatigue damage is assumed to be constant and equal to  Ref (  lim ) for  eff larger than limit value  lim [11, 13]. This correction, which plays a fundamental role in the overall accuracy of the MWCM, was introduced in light of the fact that, under large values of ratio  eff , the predictions made by the MWCM were seen to become too conservative [26]. According to the experimental results due to Kaufman and Topper [27], such a high degree of conservatism was ascribed to the fact that, when micro/meso cracks are fully open, an increase of the normal mean stress does not result in a further increase of fatigue damage. Therefore, by taking full advantage of the intrinsic mathematical limit of Eq. (6), which becomes evident when our criterion is directly expressed in terms of  a and  n,max =  n,a +  n,m [11, 13],  lim takes on the following value: A A A       2 lim (7) D ETERMINING THE MEAN STRESS SENSITIVITY INDEX n order to address the problem of estimating mean stress sensitivity index m, initially, it is useful to define the load ratio relative to the critical plane, R CP , as follows [13]: max , min , n n CP R    (8) I