Fatigue life assessment of DCI smooth specimens

Ductile cast iron (DCI) structural components are commonly employed in a wide range of industrial applications. The increasing use of DCI is justified by the good combination of mechanical and technological properties. Another advantage, not negligible, is the low production cost. The goal of the present paper is to estimate the lifetime of ductile cast iron smooth specimens under multiaxial fatigue loading, by using the multiaxial critical plane-based criterion proposed by Carpinteri and others. The obtained results in terms of fatigue life are quite satisfactory, because they fall into the scatter band 3 in almost all loading conditions examined. Finally, the accuracy of the criterion is compared with that obtained by using two stress invariant-based criteria.