Comparison of Models Predicting the Fatigue Behavior of Austenitic Stainless Steels

This paper compares the various models used to describe the fatigue behavior of Austenitic Stainless Steels. This was done for newly produced GE/EDF fatigue results and for hundreds of other data points gleaned from the literature. This comparison was made for several subsets of the data, comprising: 304 and/or 316SS, below and/or above 100°C, loading by tensile and/or bending, and for tests run in air and/or various reactor water environments. Most approaches gave reasonable correlations in the low cycle regime, but some were better than others, depending upon the subset considered. Of most critical concern was the predicted endurance limit. The Langer model used a non-conservative (too high) endurance limit. Better agreement was found for the models produced by ANL, Jaske and O’Donnell, Tsutsumi, Higuchi and Leax. These models are statistically compared by subset.