An experimental evaluation of three critical plane multiaxial fatigue criteria

Abstract The Fatemi–Socie criterion, the Jiang criterion, and a short crack growth based criterion were evaluated using the combined axial-torsion fatigue testing results obtained from extensive experiments on thin-walled tubular specimens made from S460N. The Fatemi–Socie criterion combines the maximum shear strain amplitude with a consideration of the normal stress on the critical plane. The Jiang criterion makes use of the plastic strain energy on a material plane as the major contributor to the fatigue damage. By assuming an initial crack length, the short crack model attributes the fatigue life to the action of a crack driving force, namely the effective cyclic J-integral. The results show that all the three criteria correlated well with the experimental observations in terms of fatigue life predictions. A great discrepancy was found between the predicted cracking directions and the observed cracking orientations.