Fatigue life and cyclic deformation behaviour of quenched and tempered steel AISI 4140 at two-step stress- and total-strain-controlled push - pull loading

Abstract The behaviour of steels at multi-step cyclic loading was explored up to now almost exclusively in fatigue-life-oriented investigations. Thus, only few works exist dealing with the cyclic deformation behaviour at two- and multi-step loading. Therefore, the cyclic deformation behaviour at two-step experiments with a single amplitude change (2-block experiments) and with multiple changes between two blocks of certain length and different amplitudes (multi-block experiments) was investigated in this work at the technically important steel AISI 4140 (German grade 42CrMo4).