Thermographic applications for the rapid estimation of fatigue limit

The AIAS group studying Energetic Methods for Experimental Analysis, MEAS, is performing round robin experimental tests for the rapid determination of fatigue limit on steels by different thermographic techniques. This work is part of the project and describes the experimental activity performed at Politecnico di Milano, based on stepwise cyclic tests. Thermograms are processed in terms of: 1) amplitude of the first order harmonic, in-phase with respect to the loading signal; 2) amplitude of the second harmonic, out-of-phase; 3) slope of the thermal signal with respect to the number of cycles. These values typically show bilinear trends, allowing to define a breakup point and a corresponding stress which is the thermographic estimation of the fatigue limit. The paper presents and discusses the results of tests with different stress ratios, i.e. fully reversed cycling with R=-1 and tensile-tensile cycling with R=0.1.