Issue 35

G. Meneghetti et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 35 (2016) 172-181; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.35.20 174 Typically, the mean temperature T m increases at the beginning of a fatigue tests and, after some time, it stabilises as soon as thermal equilibrium is reached with the surroundings. At thermal stabilisation, T m is constant with time, therefore the last term on the right hand side of Eq. (5) disappears. As it will be demonstrated later on, H cd can be supposed much greater than H cv and H ir , therefore it can be assumed H  H cd . The thermal power extracted from volume V of Fig. 1 by conduction can be calculated starting from the thermal flux through its boundary: ( , ) cd m m cd V S r R T r H dV gradT n dS z R d r                             (6) where gradT m is the gradient of the temperature field T(r,  ),  is the material thermal conductivity, z is the specimen’s constant thickness, dS cd =z·ds (see Fig. 1) and R the radius of the circular volume shown in Fig. 1. In Eq. (6), m h gradT n        is the specific thermal flux evaluated at the point (R,  ) of the boundary of V.  s r V R S cd S cv S ir h W Q  U Figure 1 : Energy balance for a volume of material V surrounding a crack tip subject to fatigue loadings. After having calculated the thermal power dissipated by conduction by means of Eq. (6), it is possible to estimate the energy per cycle averaged in the volume V: * 1 L V Q H dV f V     (7a) Making use of Eq. (6), it is obtained: * ( , ) 1 m L r R T r Q z R d f V r                   (7b) In previous papers, the specific heat loss Q=H/f L was used as a fatigue damage indicator to perform fatigue assessments [8-11]. Being a point-related quantity, its use was limited to the analysis of the fatigue strength of bluntly notched specimens. Following Neuber’s structural volume concept [13], in the present paper the energy term Q is averaged over a control volume V according to Eq. (7), in view of the application of the energy-based approach to severely notched or cracked components. However, it should be noted that the aim of the present paper is to formulate the fatigue related thermal problem and validate an approach able to estimate experimentally Q*. Therefore, the control volume surrounding the crack tip of Fig. 1 was fixed arbitrarily and has not a precise relation to the fatigue properties of the material. As it will be shown later on, in order to apply Eq. (7b) the surface material temperature was monitored by means of an infrared camera operating at a sample frequency f acq . In order to estimate T m (r,  ) at a given time t s during the fatigue test, a trigger signal was given to the infrared camera at t=t s and a number of infrared images n max were acquired with a sampling rate f acq . By recalling Eq. (3), the mean temperature field was estimated as pixel-by-pixel average value: