Simulation and analysis of data for enhancing low cycle fatigue test procedures

The simulation and analysis of data for enhancing low cycle fatigue test procedures is discussed in this report. The analysed materials are an austenitic stainless piping steel and an austenitic weld material. This project continues the work performed in 2003 and 2004. The fatigue test data treatment application developed within the project in 2004 for the preparation of the fatigue data has been developed further. Also, more fatigue test data has been analysed with the application than in 2004. In addition to this numerical fatigue simulations were performed with FEM code ABAQUS. With the fatigue test data treatment application one can e.g. both calculate cyclically certain relevant characteristic values, e.g. elastic range, and form a set of certain cyclical parameter values needed as a part of ABAQUS analysis input files. The hardening properties of metals were modelled with both isotropic and kinematic hardening models. The further development of the application included trimming of the analysed data, and consequently trimming of resulting hardening parameters. The need for the trimming arose from the fact that the analysed fatigue test data presents some scatter caused by the limited accuracy of the test equipment and the sampling rate. The hardening parameters obtained from the application analysis results were used in the subsequent ABAQUS analyses, and then the fatigue test data were compared with the ABAQUS simulation results. After finding a procedure to trim result data to get smooth curves for cyclic hardening, hardening and softening could be reproduced in ABAQUS analysis with a reasonable accuracy. The modelling of the fatigue induced initiation and growth of cracks was not considered in this study. On the other hand, a considerable part of the fatigue life of nuclear power plant (NPP) piping components is spent in the phase preceding the initiation and growth of cracks. (au)