Explicit microscopic fatigue analysis of forged components

International audienceNumerical modelling of fatigue behavior for anisotropic structures has become critical for design applications. This is particularly true for forged components due to the intrinsic anisotropy of the material resulting from the process. The aim of this study is to relate the microstructure features to the process scale, i.e. the engineering scale. Anisotropy is induced by the forming process and the most relevant feature which results from forging, is the preferential orientation of structural defects and grains in the direction of the deformation. Grain flow is modelled using a fiber tensor at the level of the representative elementary volume. It can then be used to improve and refine the Papadopoulos fatigue criterion by taking into account fatigue limits for each direction of anisotropy. In practice, it is very tedious to determine precisely these fatigue limits and impossible to obtain experimentally all of them for each direction of uniaxial loading. To circumvent this difficulty, we simulate the problem at the microstructure scale by considering fiber tensor as the result of the inclusion and grain orientation. Microstructures are then precisely modelled using DIGIMICRO software. A representative elementary volume with several inclusions is meshed and high cycle fatigue simulation is performed