Three-Dimensional LEFM Prediction of Fatigue Crack Propagation in a Gas Turbine Disk Material at Component Near Conditions

In this paper, the possibility to use linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM), with and without a superimposed residual stress field, to predict fatigue crack propagation in the gas turbine disk material Inconel 718 has been studied. A temperature of 400 °C and applied strain ranges corresponding to component near conditions have been considered. A three-dimensional crack propagation software was used for determining the stress intensity factors (SIFs) along the crack path. In the first approach, a linear elastic material behavior was used when analyzing the material response. The second approach extracts the residual stresses from an uncracked model with perfectly plastic material behavior after one loading cycle. As a benchmark, the investigated methods are compared to experimental tests, where the cyclic lifetimes were calculated by an integration of Paris' law. When comparing the results, it can be concluded that the investigated approaches give good results, at least for longer cracks, even though plastic flow was taking place in the specimen. The pure linear elastic simulation overestimates the crack growth for all crack lengths and gives conservative results over all considered crack lengths. Noteworthy with this work is that the 3D-crack propagation could be predicted with the two considered methods in an LEFM context, although plastic flow was present in the specimens during the experiments.