Fatigue investigations of autofrettaged steel cylinders based on neutron-diffraction measurements

A series of cyclic internal pressurization fatigue experiments was conducted on partially autofrettaged cylinders with multiple internal radial elliptic shaped cracks covering a wide range of possible configurations. A theoretical model was developed to predict the theoretical fatigue life using as input data the actual measured position of the plastic boundary from neutron-diffraction measurements on the failed specimens, as well as a position calculated analytically from the autofrettage pressure. The theoretical fatigue-life predictions based on the neutron-diffraction results were found to give the best correlation with experimental fatigue results.