Institute of Materials Science and Engineering

Physically based lifetime calculation of highly loaded materials and components in industry

Improved fuel economy and reduced CO2 emissions are important goals for the community as well as industry. Through our research, we are aiming to improve the damage tolerance of component materials, and so reduce instances of premature failure, improving the cost-effectiveness of lightweight and downsized designs.

At the Institute of Materials Science and Engineering, we characterized the fatigue behavior of variants of the steels 18CrNiMo7, 100Cr6 and C56E, commonly used in the automotive industry for components. In order to screen 300 different material conditions rapidly and precisely, we developed a new short time procedure to determine the cyclic properties of materials known as PhyBaLCHT.

For promising material conditions, we made lifetime calculations using PhyBaLLIT and so rated the damage tolerance of these material variants. We found that the higher cyclic hardening potential of the material led to a significant reduction of lifetime scatter in S—N curves.

The Institute was awarded the Stahl-Innovationspreis 2015 for this project.

 

This project is part of the DFG/AiF joint venture HiPerComp

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