Etude du comportement en fatigue à grand nombre de cycles d'un acier à haute limite d'élasticité HC360LA : endommagement, plasticité et phénomènes dissipatifs associés

摘要

The present work, which is integrated in the IRT Jules Verne APSTRAM project, focuses on the high cycle fatigue behavior of a ferritic high-strength low-alloy steel (HC360LA). First, different stress-controlled cyclic tests are carried out to study the influence of loading conditions and pre-straining on the fatigue behavior. According to the experimental results, a uniaxial tension pre-straining allows for a significant increase of the fatigue strength. Using the experimental dataset (force, elongation and temperature), an important effort is made to estimate the fraction of strain energy that is either dissipated into heat or stored within the material during cyclic tests. The strong correlation between the number of cycles to failure and heat dissipated energy emphasizes the importance of plasticity in the process driving to fatigue failure. Second, a polycrystalline model is proposed to describe the fatigue behavior of metallic materials in the high cycle fatigue regime. To consider the anisotropy of plastic properties, the constitutive model is developed at the grain scale within a crystal plasticity framework. It uses continuum damage mechanics to describe the progressive degradation of mechanical properties within an anisotropic context. The constitutive model is then integrated within a self-consistent formulation to consider the polycrystalline nature of metallic materials. Finally, the proposed model allows for investigating the fatigue behavior of the HC360LA steel at a microscopic scale. Damage is found to be highly localized in some specific grains. As a result, while fatigue damage results in a progressive decrease of elastic stiffness at the crystal scale, the elastic properties are not significantly affected at the macroscopic scale. Also, the contribution of damage to heat dissipation is negligible. The correlation between energy dissipation and fatigue failure is therefore a consequence of the strong coupling between plasticity and damage.