Low-cycle fatigue behavior of 10CrNi3MoV high strength steel and its undermatched welds

The use of high strength steel allows the design of lighter, more slender and simpler structures due to high strength and favorable ductility. Nevertheless, the increase of yield strength does not guarantee the corresponding improvement of fatigue resistance, which becomes a major concern for engineering structure design, especially for the welded joints. The paper presents a comparison of the low cycle fatigue behaviors between 10CrNi3MoV high strength steel and its undermatched weldments. Uniaxial tension tests, Push-pull, strain-controlled fatigue tests were conducted on base metal and weldments in the strain range of 0.2–1.2%. The monotonic and cyclic stress-strain curves, stress-life, strain-life and energy-life in terms of these materials were analyzed for fatigue assessment of materials discrepancy. The stress-life results of base metal and undermatched weld metal exhibit cyclic softening behaviors. Furthermore, the shapes of 10CrNi3MoV steel hysteresis loops show a satisfactory Masing-type behavior, while the weld metal shows a non-Masing type behavior. Strain, plastic and total strain energy density amplitudes against the number of reversals to failure results demonstrate that the undermatched weld metal presents a higher resistance to fatigue crack initiation than 10CrNi3MoV high strength steel. Finally, fatigue fracture surfaces of specimens were compared by scanning electron microscopy to identify the differences of crack initiation and the propagation between them