Fatigue crack propagation experiments under both force and displacement control have been performed on the wrought superalloy Haynes 230 at room temperature, using a single edge notched specimen. The force controlled tests are nominally elastic, and the displacement controlled tests have nominally large plastic hysteresis at the beginning of the tests, but saturates towards linear elastic conditions as the crack grows. As some tests are in the large scale yielding regime, a non-linear fracture mechanics approach is used to correlate crack growth rates versus the fracture parameter Delta J. It is shown that crack closure must be accounted for, to correctly model the crack growth seen in all the tests in a unified manner. For the force controlled small scale yielding tests the Newman crack closure model was used. The Newman equation is however not valid for large nominal cyclic plasticity, instead the crack closure in the displacement controlled tests is extracted from the test data. A good agreement between all tests is shown, when closure is accounted for and effective values of Delta J are used.

With increasing use of renewable energy sources, an industrial gas turbine is often a competitive solution to balance the power grid. However, life robustness approaches for gas turbine components operating under increasingly cyclic conditions are a challenging task. Ductile superalloys, as Haynes 230, are often used in stationary gas turbine hot parts such as combustors. The main load for such components is due to nonhomogeneous thermal expansion within or between parts. As the material is ductile, there is considerable redistribution of stresses and strains due to inelastic deformations during the crack initiation phase. Therefore, the subsequent crack growth occurs through a material with significant residual stresses and strains. In this work, fatigue crack propagation experiments, including the initiation phase, have been performed on a single edge notched specimen under strain controlled conditions. The test results are compared to fracture mechanics analyses using the linear ΔK and the nonlinear ΔJ approaches, and an attempt to quantify the difference in terms of a life prediction is made. For the tested notched geometry, material, and strain ranges, the difference in the results using ΔK_eff or ΔJ_eff is larger than the scatter seen when fitting the model to the experimental data. The largest differences can be found for short crack lengths, when the cyclic plastic work is the largest. The ΔJ approach clearly shows better agreement with the experimental results in this regime.

Crack length measurements with high accuracy are often difficult to achieve during fatigue crack propagation testing under non-isothermal conditions. In this work a modified approach to the compliance method defined in e.g. ASTM E647 is described, which is better suited for high loads, varying temperatures and for taking the scatter in Youngs modulus into account. A numerical finite element study is performed for a single edge notch specimen, to investigate the influence of initiation locations on the accuracy of the method. The change in cracked area versus change in stiffness for three different cases are numerically shown to collapse to one curve, i.e. the result is not significantly affected by how the crack is initiated. The numerical study is compared to results from two experiments using different materials, with heat tinting during the tests for extracting snapshots of the crack fronts. A good agreement between the experiments and the numerical study is shown. A new compliance curve and a new geometry function for the stress intensity factor is proposed for the single edge notch specimen. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Fatigue crack propagation tests under both isothermal and non-isothermal thermomechanical fatigue conditions have been performed on wrought Haynes 230, a ductile combustor material. A number of specimens were thermally aged by pre-straining and subsequent furnace exposure for 3000 h at 600 degrees C. The tests were performed both under load and strain control, between room temperature and 600 degrees C. The thermally aged notched specimens show a decrease in the crack initiation life, similar to results previously reported for smooth test specimens at room temperature. For the crack growth rates, the effects of thermal ageing were less pronounced than for crack initiation. Further, the tests have been simulated using the finite element method to calculate the crack driving force, where the plasticity induced crack closure is handled with a full history description. A temperature dependent linear kinematic hardening plasticity law has been adopted for describing the material behaviour between room temperature and 600 degrees C. A post-processing tool was used in which the plasticity induced crack opening level was calculated, followed by a calculation of the effective Delta J range for each crack length. The adopted procedure yields good correlation between the different tests, under both isothermal and non-isothermal conditions.