Comparative Approaches for Fatigue Life Estimation of Aluminium Alloy for Aerospace Applications

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to estimate the fatigue life behaviour of Al 7075-T6 using experimental and numerical methods for the purpose of aerospace applications. In this paper, initially static properties for the specimens are determined using Universal Testing Machine (UTM) under tensile loading. The cyclic bending load is applied on the material using fatigue test and the dynamic properties are determined. Experimental and numerical studies are carried out to determine the fatigue strength and endurance limit values of aluminium alloy 7075-T6 at different types of loading. The fatigue strength and structural integrity of the aluminium alloy 7075 - T6 are investigated using S-N curve. In numerical simulation, the reference model of this paper has been modelled by CATIA and thereby it is imported into ANSYS workbench 16.2 to investigate the stress distribution and number of cycles to failure of an aluminium alloy 7075-T6 under tensile loading. The mechanical properties are evaluated using both the approaches and finally the comparative study is carried out.