Fatigue Behaviour and Mean Stress Effect of Thermoplastic Polymers and Composites

Abstract

More and more polymers and polymer composite materials are used in automotive industry to reduce cost and weight of vehicles to meet the environmental requirement. However, the fatigue behaviour for these materials is less understanding than metallic materials. The current work is focussed on the fatigue behaviour for a range of thermoplastic polymer/composite materials. It reveals that the fatigue behaviour of these materials can be described by S-N curves using the Basquin Equation. All the materials exhibit significant mean stress effect. The most commonly used mean stress correction equations developed in metal fatigue were evaluated with the current test results. It reveals that Goodman, Gerber and Soderberg cannot be used as generic equations for the materials investigated, whereas Smith-Watson-Topper can correlate the test data reasonably well, but the best correlation is given by Walker with material constant γ = 0.4.