PSI - Issue 57

Sanjay Gothivarekar et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 57 (2024) 487–493 S. Gothivarekar et al./ Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2023) 000 – 000

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in Figure 2. To model the fatigue load, the specimen is fixed on the left side while a tensile load with cyclic amplitude is applied on the right, depicted in Figure 2.

Fig. 1. Fatigue specimen geometry [2]. In the center of the specimen, a small slot is introduced with a central length of 3 mm and width of 1 mm to fit a rectangular part with randomly generated grain structure. This part is referred to as the Voronoi part and has an initial length 0 of 3.1 mm. In Figure 3 (a) more modelling details can be found for the assembly. Here, the red dotted line illustrates the cutting line across several grains, using a radius of 100 mm. This cutting procedure leads to a more realistic shape and distribution of cut grains near the edge of the critical zone. The remaining edges of the Voronoi part are tied to the surface faces of the slot in the specimen using a tie constraint. Moreover, a specific mesh transition strategy was used through Coreform Cubit software, resulting in a minimum element size of 8 m near the central area of interest [7].

Fig. 2. Simplified specimen geometry with orphan mesh.

Fig. 3. Modelling details of a Voronoi part in the assembly.