High-temperature fatigue-life estimation: Extension of a unified theory

A procedure is presented for predicting the fatigue behavior at elevated temperature by extending the unified theory of fatigue damage previously proposed for room temperature. The method predicts the experimental results of high-temperature push-pull tests under isothermal conditions, using the total strain range. The analysis is based on parameters obtained from short-term tensile tests in which the temperature and the strain rate are the same as for the fatigue test. The procedure is applied for fatigue of a stainless steel at 650°C under cyclic axial strain. It has also been applied to published data for three austenitic stainless steels. In general, the present procedure gives estimates closer to experimental results than those obtained from other known methods.