UNDERSTANDING FATIGUE DAMAGE PROGRESSION IN A STRUCTURAL STAINLESS STEEL THROUGH CYCLIC BALL INDENTATION TESTING

Understanding fatigue damage progression and estimating remaining life of dynamically loaded components has been a major challenge for several safety critical in-service components. Towards this, a few small specimen fatigue test methods are available, such as, cyclic ball indentation, cyclic small punch test and cyclic bulge test etc. Cyclic ball indentation has the potential to be deployed in-situ during plant maintenance to record fatigue response of localized spots. The method uses a spherical indenter of 1/16” (~1.58 mm) diameter which applies cyclic compression-compression loading on the material at selected location and monitors the load-displacement response continuously to identify failure event due to fatigue.
To capture a complete picture of this, controlled experiments using carefully prepared dog bone fatigue specimens of SS 304 have been conducted. The dog bone specimen is fatigue cycled under tension-tension uni-axial loading till failure, with Acoustic Emission (AE) signature capture during fatigue cycling. the fatigue cycling is interrupted periodically and cyclic ball indentation tests are carried out again at some locations of gage length to identify failure life cycle data of fatigue cycled specimen through displacement sensing and hysteresis area. Data obtained from cyclic ball indentation is then correlated with loss of stiffness.
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