Piezo-Barkhausen Emission as an Indicator of the Fatigue Limit of Steel

The fatigue properties of two variants of AISI 1018 steel samples were measured in a series of 33 experiments using new kinds of magnetic diagnostics. An MTS-810 servohydraulic test machine applied sinusoidal fully reversed (R = −1) loads under strain (Є) control in the range of 0.0008 $≤$ (Є)$≤$ 0.0020. In 28 experiments, the number of cycles to fatigue failure N_f varied between 36,000 < N_f < 3,661,000. By contrast, in five runs extending over 10⁷ cycles, the specimens showed no detectable signs of weakening or damage. The corresponding “S-N” or classical Wöhler plots indicated that the transitions from fatigue failure to nominally infinite life (i.e., the fatigue limit) occurred at strains of about Є = 0.0009 and Є = 0.0010, respectively, for the two types of steel. Every loading cycle of each test was instrumented to record continual values of stress and strain. Flux gate magnetometers measured the variations of the piezomagnetic fields near the specimens. A 1000-turn coil surrounding the test pieces detected the piezo-Barkhausen pulses generated by abrupt rearrangements of their internal ferromagnetic domain structures. Analyses of the magnetic data yielded four independent indices each of which located the fatigue limits in complete agreement with the values derived from the Wöhler curves.