Thermography in high cycle fatigue short‐term evaluation procedures applied to a medium carbon steel

This paper focuses on the fatigue life calculation for an unalloyed medium carbon steel SAE1045 (German DIN‐standard: C45E), by applying an energy dissipation‐based approach quantified through thermographic measurements. The purpose of this approach is to establish an intrinsic dissipation model and to predict characteristics derived from the cyclic deformation behavior of stress‐controlled fatigue tests, eg, the fatigue limit and the S‐N data by using simplified (zero‐dimensional, 0D) thermodynamic equations. In order to investigate the possibilities for a rapid evaluation while simultaneously reducing the experimental effort, one load increase test (LIT) and two constant amplitude tests (CATs) were carried out. The S‐N data evaluated on such a basis is competitive to conventionally determined S‐N data as will be shown.