PSI - Issue 45

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2022) 000 – 000

www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

ScienceDirect

Procedia Structural Integrity 45 (2023) 44–51

17th Asia-Pacific Conference on Fracture and Strength and the 13th Conference on Structural Integrity and Failure (APCFS 2022 & SIF 2022) Cycle-by-cycle crack closure measurements and fatigue crack growth in CT specimen made of 7075-T7351 aluminium

James Martin Hughes a,* , Chris Wallbrink b , Andrei Kotousov a a School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, The University of Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia b Platforms Division, Defence Science and Technology Group, VIC 3207, Australia

© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of Prof. Andrei Kotousov Abstract In this study, an advanced piezoelectric strain sensor is applied to measure the crack opening loads of a compact tension specimen with a fatigue crack under variable amplitude block loading. The crack opening loads are subsequently utilised to modify the stress intensity factor range by taking into account the proportion of each load cycle for which the fatigue crack remained closed. This effective stress intensity factor is applied to collapse the growth rate curve, which initially displays a strong dependence on stress ratio, into a single master curve where the only variable governing crack extension is the effective stress intensity factor. The findings of this study provide strong evidence for the crack closure concept, which is important for the development of algorithms which can compress/truncate large spectrums. These algorithms rely on a detailed understanding of how much the crack is open or closed during each load cycle. Furthermore, the results indicate that the piezoelectric sensor could be used to study crack closure under realistic spectrum loading conditions, which will be the subject of future investigations. © 2023 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of Prof. Andrei Kotousov Keywords: Crack closure; fatigue; crack growth; load spectrum

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: james.m.hughes@adelaide.edu.au

2452-3216 © 2023 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of Prof. Andrei Kotousov

2452-3216 © 2023 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of Prof. Andrei Kotousov 10.1016/j.prostr.2023.05.012