Low cycle fatigue life prediction of the demining tiller tool

The paper presents strain-based fatigue assessment of the rotating demining tiller tool. In order to make a cost reduction, the idea was to replace initially applied high strength steel with unalloyed structural steels. To maintain the same or almost the same durability, the original geometry needed to be improved. The LCF theory was chosen as the verification tool. Transient nonlinear mechanical analysis and Low cycle fatigue (LCF) assessment was performed for tiller tool with high strength steel and unalloyed structural steels. The two step LCF assessment procedure has been proposed in order to improve tiller design. As the first step, a nonlinear transient FE analysis was done and as a result, elastic and plastic strains were found. In the second step the LCF assessment of the demining tool tiller was made according to von Mises strain amplitudes and Coffin-Manson model. Finally, it can be concluded that the proposed methodology for low cycle fatigue estimation yielded with the cost reduction, simpler production and maintained the desired tiller tool life.