Low-cycle fatigue behavior and life prediction of TA15 titanium alloy by crystal plasticity-based modelling

It is of significance to reveal the low-cycle fatigue deformation mechanism of titanium alloy with tri-modal microstructure for improving its properties. This work developed a crystal plasticity finite element model based on realistic microstructure to predict the low-cycle fatigue behavior of TA15 titanium alloys with tri-modal microstructure containing primary α (αp), secondary lamellar α (αl) and transformed β (βt). During modelling, plastic strain accumulation (PSA) and energy dissipation were used as the fatigue indicator parameter (FIP) to predict fatigue damage and life. It is found that the fatigue deformation prefers to localize at the interfaces of αp/β, αl/β and at triple junctions, which leads to the initiation of fatigue crack. In addition, the soft geometry of αl will also contribute to the strain localization inside αl grains causing fatigue damage. This is because the local lattice rotation is more prone to occur at these locations due to the tension-compression asymmetry of lattice rotation, which induces the occurrence of the microtexture and aggravates the heterogeneity of the lattice rotation, leading to the localized PSA and the total energy dissipation. And the asymmetry of lattice rotation in each cycle also leads to the tension-compression asymmetry of flow behavior. Both of the two FIPs can effectively predict fatigue life. With the strain amplitude increasing, the PSA-based model shows a relatively higher predictive accuracy of fatigue life than that of the accumulated energy dissipation-based model. The predicted fatigue life is in accordance with the C-M model.