Visualization of Thermal Fatigue Damage Distribution With Simplified Stress Range Calculations

This paper proposes simplified methods to evaluate fatigue damage in a component subjected to cyclic thermal loads to visualize damage distribution by using typical computer-aided engineering systems. The objective is to perform the evaluations on a standard desktop PC within a reasonably short computation time. Three simplified methods for defining elastic stress ranges are proposed in place of the method in the ASME Subsection NH procedures. A thermal fatigue test that was previously performed using a type-304 stainless steel (304SS) cylinder is simulated to validate the proposed methods. Heat transfer and elastic analyses are conducted. Simultaneously with the analyses, fatigue usage factors are calculated using user subroutines formulated in this study, including the three simplified methods and the ASME NH-based method. The calculated values of the fatigue usage factor are visualized using a graphical user interface (GUI) incorporated into a commercial finite-element analysis (FEA) code. The fatigue usage factor distribution obtained using the simplified methods could be calculated without requiring large amounts of memory and long computation time. In addition, the distribution of the fatigue usage factor was consistent with the distribution of cracks observed in the test.