A test method for the determination of the cyclic material properties of electrical steel strip under strain-controlled loading

Abstract

Abstract The rotors of electric machines are made of thin steel sheets, called electrical steel. Under service conditions, local strain may exceed the elastic limit i. e. for a lifetime assessment local strain might be of great significance. The main challenge for a reliable determination of the cyclic material properties of 0.3 mm thin electrical steel is to avoid buckling in the area of compression of fully reversed strain-controlled tests. Two approaches have been investigated. First, the test setup was improved and adapted to thin electrical steel specimens for which four different linear supported anti-buckling devices were developed and tested for fully reversed strain-controlled loading with the result that the best solution was a new approach using DLC coating instead of a polytetrafluoroethylene strip for reducing the friction between the specimen and the anti-buckling device. Secondly, the influence of increasing the specimen thickness by stacking single specimens through adhesive bonding is presented here.