STRAIN AND STRESS/FORCE-CONTROLLED FATIGUE TESTING OF METALLIC MATERIALS, POST-PROCESSING OF EXPERIMENTALLY OBTAINED RESULTS AND APPLICATION IN FEA

Abstract

Fatigue of metals is a very complex phenomenon, which is still not fully understood and is also the topic of much active research. Fatigue testing is a method used to evaluate how a material behaves under repeated stress and cyclic loading. The aim of this paper is to show strain and stress/forcecontrolled testing of metallic materials using developed procedures according to relevant standards. The paper has presented a very useful developed software application for the determination of fatigue properties of metallic materials, whereas the user is enabled to display the corresponding fatigue properties of the tested material as well as the corresponding ε-N or S-N curves. The obtained fatigue properties of the tested materials can be used with great success in numerical calculations, especially FEA, to estimate the endurance limit and fatigue life of various types of metallic structures.