The fatigue of dual phase steel was examined in terms of calorimetric effects in order to match the energy manifestations of fatigue and constitutive equations drawn up in a thermomechanical framework. A simplified method, assuming a homogeneous fatigue test, is proposed to determine heat source development from a temperature field provided by an infrared camera. Thermoelastic and dissipative sources were then separately identified. Experimental results concerning thermoelastic effects are in close agreement with theoretical estimates. Dissipation depends on the loading frequency and stress amplitude applied to the fatigue specimen. However, as the marked decrease in dissipation observed when testing a block at high stress was not easily interpretable in terms of material effects, we questioned the homogeneous fatigue test assumption.

It is proposed to develop and identify a probabilistic two-scale model for HCF that accounts for the failure of samples but also for the thermal effects during cyclic loadings in a unified framework.The probabilistic model is based on a Poisson point process. Within the weakest link theory, the model corresponds to a Weibull law for the fatigue limits. The thermal effects can be described if one considers the same hypotheses apart from the weakest link assumption. A method of identification is proposed and uses temperature measurements to identify the scatter in an S/N curve. The validation of the model is obtained by predicting S/N curves for different effective volumes of a dual-phase steel.

This paper presents an infrared image processing procedure that was developed to study calorific effects accompanying material fatigue. This method enables us to separately estimate patterns of thermoelastic and dissipative sources. Heat sources were estimated on the basis of partial derivative operators present in a local form of the heat equation by using a set of approximation functions that locally fits the temperature field and takes the spectral properties of the sought sources into account. Numerical examples were used to check the validity of the method and to highlight its capabilities along with its limits. The paper concludes with examples of thermal image processing extracted from fatigue tests performed on a dual-phase steel. The coupling sources were compared to the theoretical predictions induced by a basic thermoelastic model, while the heterogeneous character of the fatigue development was highlighted in terms of dissipation sources.

Identification of the scatter in high cycle fatigue from temperature measurements. Comptes Rendus Mécanique, Elsevier Masson, 2004, 332, pp.

This paper presents several properties of heat source fields accompanying the highcycle fatigue of a dual-phase steel grade. Heat sources were derived from thermal data provided by an infrared focal plane array camera. An especially developed image processing estimates separately the thermoelastic coupling source amplitude and the mean dissipation per cycle. Our experiments underline that dissipation sources are heterogeneous and this forms the beginning of the fatigue test. They also point out a linear evolution of the mean dissipation per cycle as a function of the loading frequency for a given stress range and a given loading ratio. KEY WORDS: dissipation, fatigue, infrared thermography, steel NOTATION C Specific heat s 2D th Time constant that characterises the perpendicular heat exchanges between front and back specimen faces and the surroundings