Fatigue Strength Analysis of S34MnV Steel by Accelerated Staircase Test

This paper presents the reliability estimation of fatigue strength of the material used for crank throw components. The material used for crank throw components is forged S34MnV steel and subsequently heat-treated by normalising and tempering. High cycle fatigue testing under fully reversed cycling (R = 1) was performed to determine the fatigue limit of the material. The staircase test method is used to obtain accurate values of the mean fatigue limit stress until a number of cycles up to 1E7 cycles. Subsequently, the fatigue test results depend strongly on the stress step and are evaluated by the Dixon-Mood formula. The values of mean fatigue strength and standard deviation predicted by the staircase method are 282 MPa and 10.6 MPa, respectively. Finally, the reliability of the design fatigue strength in some selected probability of failure is calculated. Results indicate that the fatigue strength determined from accelerated staircase test is consistent with conventional fatigue testing. Furthermore, the proposed method can be applied for the determination of fatigue strength and standard deviation for design optimisation of S34MnV steel.