Marie-Cécile Robin

Abstract

Mechanical behaviour and fatigue lifetime of tubular parts, welded or not, made of ferritic stainless steel (1.4509): car manifold lifetime assessment

Marie-Cécile Robin-Boudaoud - 14 December 2010

Faurecia uses stainless ferritic steels to produce car manifolds, which are made of several tubular parts welded together.
In order to reduce design costs, Faurecia needs to develop a robust numerical design tool. In the frame of this project, this thesis is a contribution to fatigue life assessment of 1.4509 stainless steel tubular parts, welded or not, submitted to cyclic thermomechanical loadings.
In a first part, the cyclic mechanical behaviours of the base metal (1.4509 steel) and the melted metal are experimentally studied under various loads. They are then described thanks to an elastoviscoplastic model. The specific mechanical behaviour of the heat affected zone is also considered. The ability of the proposed models to describe the mechanical response of a welded zone is assessed thanks to a traction compression test including local strain measurements.
In a second part, fatigue life of 1.4509 steel is addressed. A large experimental database is built up. A non isothermal continuum damage model (J. Lemaître model) is identified. The same test conditions are applied to welded specimens. Then, the results of those tests are analysed thanks to an uncoupled approach of mechanical behaviour and damage. It is so considered that the strain distribution at the stabilized cycle, governs the fatigue life of the welded specimen. Thanks to this method, most the tests are well predicted (within a scattering band of factor 3 maximum).
Finally, last part of this thesis concerns the integration of the identified models in a robust numerical tool in order to predict fatigue life of industrial welded parts. A sub model methodology is used in order to precisely predict the stabilized mechanical behaviour of welded zone. This technique is successfully applied to predict the fatigue life of two welded parts, included a car manifold.

Keywords: mechanical behaviour, fatigue lifetime, weld, stainless steel, lifetime assessment

Last modified: 05/27/2011 08:12 PM