| Abstract: | Fatigue damage in materials is considered to be the effect of material degradation, and the dispersion in fatigue life is attributed to variability in microstructure. This paper presents a numerical model to simulate fatigue damage evolution using continuum damage mechanics to characterize material degradation. An explicit microstructure topology representation is achieved using Voronoi tessellations. Unlike conventional models which use a scalar approximation for damage, this model treats the damage variable as an anisotropic tensor. The model is used to simulate tensile fatigue failure in thin steel specimen. The fatigue life estimations from the model compares well with published experimental results. The results predict a high variability in fatigue life that is characteristic of metals and alloys, as compared with the existing isotropic damage models available in the literature. The model was also used to study the influence of material inhomogeneity on fatigue life dispersion. |
