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Selected ferritic stainless steel sheets for exhaust applications were tested under thermo-mechanical fatigue (TMF) condition in the temperature range of 400-800 °C with partial constraint. Straight welded tubes were used as the testing coupons to withstand large compression without buckling, and to understand the effect of welding as well. Repeated tests confirmed the observed failure scenario for each material type. The hysteresis loop behaviors were also simulated using the mechanism-based integrated creep and fatigue theory (ICFT) model. Although more development work is needed, for quick material screening purpose this type of testing could be a very cost effective solution for materials and tube weld development for exhaust applications.

In this paper, both standard and constrained thermomechanical fatigue (TMF) tests were conducted on a high silicon ductile cast iron (DCI). The standard TMF tests were conducted with independent control of mechanical strain, out-of-phase (OP) and in-phase (IP) strain, and temperature in the range from 300 to 800°C. The constrained TMF tests were conducted with various constraint ratios of 100%, 70%, 60% and 50% at the temperature ranges of 160 to 600°C and 160 to 700°C. Based on a material model as calibrated with low-cycle fatigue (LCF) data of DCI, finite element analyses (FEA) of the above TMF tests were carried out with Abaqus. A damage mechanism-based lifetime model was integrated into a C++ API code to post-process the Abaqus output results. Simulation predictions show good agreement with experiments for stress-strain responses and lifetime under different TMF conditions.