Thermography in high cycle fatigue short-term evaluation procedures applied to a medium carbon steel

This paper focuses on the fatigue life calculation for an unalloyed medium carbon steel SAE1045 (German DIN-standard: C45E), by applying an energy dissipation-based approach quantified through thermographic measurements. The purpose of this approach is to establish an intrinsic dissipation model and to predict characteristics derived from the cyclic deformation behavior of stress-controlled fatigue tests, eg, the fatigue limit and the S-N data by using simplified (zero-dimensional, 0D) thermodynamic equations. In order to investigate the possibilities for a rapid evaluation while simultaneously reducing the experimental effort, one load increase test (LIT) and two constant amplitude tests (CATs) were carried out. The S-N data evaluated on such a basis is competitive to conventionally determined S-N data as will be shown.