Description

This course is designed to build participants’ background from basics to the advanced level of fatigue fracture analysis. It will cover practical-analytical aspects of fatigue failure and fracture mechanics for engineering components and structures subjected to various cyclic loading conditions. Typical fatigue problems are analyzed and methods of solution are discussed.

Topics covered include: fundamental concepts of fracture mechanics and fatigue damage in materials, fatigue fracture analysis of cyclically loaded components, practical application, the stress intensity factor, fatigue and fracture data analysis, fatigue crack initiation and growth of engineering components subjected to the uniaxial and multiaxial fatigue loading conditions, fatigue damage theories, and cyclic plasticity and ratcheting response of materials.

This course can either be taken over a three-day period (28-30 August 2024) for those who need to learn the fundamentals of fatigue fracture or a two-day period (29-30 August 2024) for participants who already have a knowledge of fatigue fracture.

Target audience

Students who need to learn the fundamentals of fatigue fracture, as well as engineers practicing in various disciplines including automobile, aerospace, pipeline and petroleum industries with a focus on stress analysis and failure of engineering components, can benefit this short course.

Course Structure

Day 1 - Wednesday 28 August:

  • Overview of stress and strain states, and materials properties
  • Cyclic stress/ strain- fatigue life
  • The elements of elastic and plastic behaviour of materials
  • Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM)

Day 2 - Thursday 29 August:

  • Crack tip plasticity, R curves, and Fracture toughness
  • Fatigue damage and cycle counting analyses
  • Stress concentration factor, stress raiser effect on fatigue life
  • Crack growth rate and fatigue life prediction

Day 3 - Friday 30 August:

  • The effect of mean stress on fatigue life of engineering components
  • Fracture surface analysis
  • Fatigue damage theories and approaches
  • Cyclic plasticity and ratcheting theories

Presenter

Dr Ahmad Varvani is a professor at the Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. Over the past twenty-five years, he has been consistently investigating the fatigue and ratcheting response of engineering components and structures at various loading conditions. Varvani’s long term research outlook has been to assess fatigue damage under various complex loading conditions, to investigate ratcheting-fatigue interaction for load-bearing components and to predict overall damage of materials, to develop combined hardening rules, and to accommodate for viscoplastic ratcheting assessment of materials at various loading steps, sequences and rates, and to develop analytical solutions evaluating local ratcheting response and stress relaxation at the presence of stress raisers. Dr Varvani has supervised hundreds of students in the field, who are currently working as engineers in different industries. In addition, he has authored and co-authored over a hundred scientific articles published in refereed journals and international conference proceedings.