Research and development into a European code-of-practice for strain-controlled thermo-mechanical fatigue testing

Thermo-mechanical fatigue (TMF) testing plays an increasingly important role in the design, the reliability assessment and the lifecycle management of safety critical components used, for instance, for power generation, in the process industry and in aeronautical and automotive applications, with a view to increasing the fuel efficiency, safety and service intervals, while reducing production (and material) costs. In a European Commission funded research project (acronym: TMF-Standard) of the 5th Framework Programme, 20 European laboratories have undertaken a joint research effort to establish a validated code-of-practice (CoP) for strain-controlled TMF testing. Starting from a survey of the testing protocols and procedures previously used by the partners, a comprehensive pre-normative research activity into various issues has been completed, addressing the dynamic temperature control, the effects of deviations in nominal temperatures and phase angles, the influences of temperature gradients, as well as the practicalities of test interruption and restart procedures. Meaningful allowable tolerances for the various test parameters were identified and practical recommendations as to the test techniques were formulated. From this a preliminary CoP was compiled and used to guide an extensive round robin exercise among the project partners. From the statistical analysis of that exercise, a validated CoP was derived dealing with strain-controlled constant amplitude TMF of nominally homogeneous metallic materials subjected to spatially uniform temperature fields and uniaxial mechanical loading. It is intended to give advice and guidance on the appropriate test setup, testing procedures and the analysis of results, in particular for newcomers in the field of strain-controlled TMF. This paper highlights some of the results of the TMF-Standard project. Moreover, commonalities and differences of the present CoP with respect to the standard documents for strain-controlled TMF, which have been developed at ISO and ASTM levels, are presented in this paper.