Citation: Wu, H.; Ziman, J.A.;
Raghuraman, S.R.; Nebel, J.-E.;
Weber, F.; Starke, P. Short-Time
Fatigue Life Estimation for Heat
Treated Low Carbon Steels by
Applying Electrical Resistance and
Magnetic Barkhausen Noise.
Materials 2023, 16, 32.
https://doi.org/
10.3390/ma16010032
Academic Editors:
Alberto Campagnolo and
Alberto Sapora
Received: 23 November 2022
Revised: 15 December 2022
Accepted: 17 December 2022
Published: 21 December 2022
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Article
Short-Time Fatigue Life Estimation for Heat Treated Low
Carbon Steels by Applying Electrical Resistance and Magnetic
Barkhausen Noise
Haoran Wu
1,2,
* , Jonas Anton Ziman
1,2
, Srinivasa Raghavan Raghuraman
1
, Jan-Erik Nebel
1
, Fabian Weber
1,2
and Peter Starke
1,2
1
Department of Materials Science and Materials Testing, Institute QM3, University of Applied Sciences
Kaiserslautern, D-67659 Kaiserslautern, Germany
2
Faculty of Natural Sciences and Technology, Saarland University, D-66123 Saarbruecken, Germany
* Correspondence: haoran.wu@hs-kl.de
Abstract:
Tensile tests and fatigue tests on differently heat-treated low carbon (non- and low-alloy)
steels were conducted and accompanied by non-destructive electrical resistometric (ER) and magnetic
Barkhausen noise (MBN) measuring devices, in order to establish an improved short-time fatigue life
estimation method according to StressLife. MaRePLife (
Ma
terial
Re
sponse
P
artitioning) is the hereby
proposed method for calculating S–N curves in the HCF regime, based on the partitioning of material
responses acquired during the above-mentioned mechanical tests. The rules were set to make use of
the information gathered from pre-conducted tensile tests, which helps to determine the parameters
of two load increase tests (LIT) and two constant amplitude tests (CAT). The results of the calculated
S–N curves were satisfactory and could be verified by more separately conducted fatigue tests on
specimens under different material conditions.
Keywords:
electrical resistance; magnetic Barkhausen noise; NDT; fatigue life; constant amplitude
test; load increase test; tensile test; load-free sequence; low carbon steel; MaRePLife; StressLife
1. Introduction
For stress/force-controlled fatigue tests, a power law relationship according to Basquin
is usually applied to describe S–N curves mathematically [
1
]. However, for strain-controlled
tests, the Coffin–Manson relationship is used to describe the low-cycle fatigue (LCF)
regime [
2
,
3
], while in the high-cycle fatigue (HCF) regime, the total strain–life curve (
ε
a,t
-N
f
)
is separated into a plastic portion (
ε
a,p
), described via the Coffin–Manson relationship, and
an elastic portion (
ε
a,e
), related to Basquin’s equation. The conventional way of gathering S–
N data is time- and cost-consuming; even for the HCF regime, at least 15 tests are required.
Therefore, methods of accelerating this process or reducing the costs are always of interest.
Researchers have paid attention to integrate non-destructive testing (NDT) methods into
fatigue tests, so that more physical quantities can be measured and further processed for
obtaining additional information regarding the fatigue processes compared to conventional
strain, stress or the number of cycles to failure.
For example, electrical resistance (ER) has been researched for a long time after the
pioneering work of Matthiessen [
4
]. The relation between mechanical stress and ER has
been constantly researched ever since [
5
–
13
], even in this decade [
14
–
16
]. ER has also been
used for investigating the fatigue properties of conductive materials [
17
–
25
]. Information
regarding the defect density in bulk materials can be obtained via electrical resistance
measurements [26,27], which can explain some early-stage fatigue phenomena.
In addition to ER, micromagnetic-based methods can also be used in this context,
such as eddy current testing, incremental permeability, Fourier analysis of the tangential
Materials 2023, 16, 32. https://doi.org/10.3390/ma16010032 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/materials
