Fatigue damage assesment using thermoelastic stress analysis

Accurate crack detection and assessment of the fatigue damage in industrial components has been a major area of interest and research over the last decades. In this sense, the ability to make reliable stress measurements at the crack tip is an essential part in the understanding of the fatigue process. In the current work Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) is presented as a novel methodology for measuring the effective stress intensity factor from the analysis of thermoelastic images. In addition, ∆K values inferred using TSA have been employed to estimate an equivalent opening/closing load. Results have been compared with those obtained using the strain-offset technique showing an excellent level of agreement.