Fatigue strength assessment of heavy section ductile irons through the average strain density energy criterion

In recent years, strain energy-based criteria used to predict the static and fatigue strength of notched components have attracted the attention of many researchers. The reasons are a lot. The energy density is first of all a scalar quantity, and when calculated by finite element methods, it does not need a fine mesh, which speeds up significantly the design of complex as well as large structures. Among these approaches, the average strain energy density (ASED) states that failure will occur when the strain energy averaged over a control volume of radius R_c will reach a critical value. R_c is a material property to be determined by experiments. In the present work, the ASED criterion is applied to heavy section ductile irons containing defects. It is found that a narrow ASED-based scatter band is able to summarize the fatigue behaviors of different ductile irons families.