Strain-based multiaxial fatigue damage modelling

A new multiaxial fatigue damage model named characteristic plane approach is proposed in this paper, in which the strain components are used to correlate with the fatigue damage. The characteristic plane is defined as a material plane on which the complex three-dimensional (3D) fatigue problem can be approximated using the plane strain components. Compared with most available critical plane-based models for multiaxial fatigue problem, the physical basis of the characteristic plane does not rely on the observations of the fatigue crack in the proposed model. The cracking information is not required for multi-axial fatigue analysis, and the proposed model can automatically adapt for different failure modes, such as shear or tensile-dominated failure. Mean stress effect is also included in the proposed model by a correction factor. The life predictions of the proposed fatigue damage model under constant amplitude loading are compared with a wide range of metal fatigue results in the literature.