Experimental and computational investigation of cyclic mechanical behavior of sintered iron

Sintered metals have found wide applications in mechanical design for their low manufacturing costs. The present paper deals with a sintered iron powder material (ASC 100.29) which is specially manufactured for experimental and computational investigations. The material has been tested under both monotonic and cyclic loading conditions. Fully reversed fatigue tests have been performed with different material porosities, strain loading ratios and loading amplitudes. Cyclic stress–strain curves and corresponding fatigue life curves are identified. Experiments confirm that the cyclic loading reduces material fracture strain dramatically and the mean strain does not influence fatigue life, regardless of material porosities. The resulting hysteresis loops have been investigated concerning the hardening mechanism. The computational simulations show that the superposition of a nonlinear kinematic and isotropic hardening model can describe experiments reasonably. Computational verification reveals that the identified material model will hardly predict ratcheting behavior of the material.