Numerical study of the casting features on the fracture and debonding of Mg17Al12 in AM60B Mg alloy under high cycle fatigue condition

Based on the methods proposed by Gall et al. [Gall K, Horstemeyer MF, McDowell DL, Fan JH. Finite element analysis of the stress distributions near damaged Si particle clusters in cast Al–Si alloys. Mech Mater 2000;32:277–301], Gao et al. [Gao YX, Yi JZ, Lee PD, Lindley TC. A micro-cell model of the effect of microstructure and defects on fatigue resistance in cast aluminum alloys. Acta Mater 2004;52:5435–49], and Horstemeyer et al. [Horstemeyer MF, Ramaswamy S, Negrete M. Using a micromechanical finite element parametric study to motivate a phenomenological macroscale model for void/crack nucleation in aluminum with a hard second phase. Mech Mater 2003;35:675–87], a micro-cell finite element model was developed to study the effect of six important casting features on debonding and fracture of the Mg17Al12 particles in a cast AM60B magnesium alloy under high cycle fatigue condition. The constitutive behaviour of the AM60B alloy and the Mg-2.0∼2.5%Al matrix was simulated by employing the Ohno–Wang multilinear kinematic hardening model. The elastic constants of Mg17Al12 particles were determined using conventional ultrasonic measurement technique. To verify the relative influence of each cast feature, a two level design of experiment (DOE) approach was used.