Comprehensive investigation of fatigue behavior and a new strain-life model for CP-Ti under different loading conditions

Abstract This paper investigates symmetric strain, stress and asymmetric stress-controlled fatigue behavior of prestrained and non-prestrained CP-Ti. The effects of stress ratio, mean stress, prestrain on stress/strain life were carefully analyzed. Stress-life of CP-Ti shows non-monotonic variation with stress ratio, as compressive ratcheting resulted by tension-compression asymmetry accumulates under symmetric stress cycling. Stress-life can be improved by prestrain, regardless of loading condition, due to the decrease of responded strain amplitude. Stress fatigue resistance of the material is actually deteriorated by prestrain at the stress level identical to that of non-prestrained CP-Ti. Strain-life of prestrained sample shows little variation at high strain amplitude due to mean stress relaxation and significant reduction at low strain amplitude. By introducing asymmetry factor, it is further found that strain-life of the material is insensitive to prestrain if the applied mean stress level keeps constant. Finally, current strain-life models with different mean stress correction terms are discussed to evaluate their application ability in fatigue life prediction of CP-Ti under different loading conditions. Though two additional parameters are introduced into the mean stress correction term with power law form, there are still few data points beyond the scatter bounds of two. Therefore, a new strain-life model with exponential mean stress correction term is proposed and verified by fatigue life data of different materials, which has more advantage than existing strain-life models at a wide range of mean stress level.