Development of New Design Fatigue Curves in Japan: Discussion of Effect of Surface Finish on Fatigue Strength of Nuclear Component Materials

Based on the world wide fatigue test database, The Design Fatigue Curve (DFC) Phase 1 and 2 subcommittees established in The Japan Welding Engineering Society (JWES) have been developed new design fatigue curves which are applied for the nuclear component materials, in air environment. The effects of the design factor, such as mean stress, size effect and surface finish, etc. on the fatigue curves are also discussed with the fatigue database in order to construct fatigue evaluation method for the new design fatigue curves. The subcommittees also have studied the applicability of newly developed fatigue evaluation method to the nuclear component materials. This paper reports the fatigue test results of machined finished small-scale test specimens which are used for the verification of proposed fatigue evaluation method. The materials subjected to the fatigue tests are austenitic stainless steel SUS316LTP, low-alloy steels SQV2A and SCM435H, and carbon steel STPT370. Specimens finished with lathe machining are subjected to the tests. The planed maximum height roughness of the specimen are 25 and 100 μm. The fatigue test results show that the surface finish effect on the fatigue strength in the high cycle region of the austenitic stainless steel can be negligible. On the other hand, fatigue strength of the carbon steel and low alloy steel is decreased as increasing the surface roughness of the specimen. Especially, decrease of fatigue strength for the specimens with more than 100 μm maximum height roughness is larger than that of conventional estimation. It is presumed that severe roughness introduced by lathe machining tends to behave as notches and increase the stress concentration at the specimen surface, and resulted in unexpected decrease of fatigue strength.