High-temperature fatigue strength of a copper-cobalt-beryllium alloy

This article summarizes the results from uniaxial tension stress-controlled fatigue tests performed at 650°C on Cu-Be specimens. Two geometries are considered: hourglass-shaped specimens and plates weakened by a central hole. The motivation of this present study is that, at the best of the authors knowledge, only a limited number of studies on copper alloys under high-temperature fatigue are available in the literature, and no results from these alloys deal with notched components. In the present contribution, after a brief review of the recent literature, material properties and experimental procedure are described. The new data from un-notched and notched specimens are summarized in the corresponding fatigue curves. By analyzing the fatigue behavior of the plates weakened by central holes, a reduction of the fatigue strength about equal to 40% at 2 million cycles can be noted, whereas the inverse slope, k, is very close to that of un-notched specimens. All fatigue data from un-notched and notched specimens are reanalyzed here in terms of the mean value of the strain energy density. The approach, successfully used to summarize fatigue data from notched specimens tested at room temperature, is extended here for the first time to high-temperature fatigue. In the plates with central holes, the strain energy density is evaluated over a finite size control volume surrounding the highly stressed zone at the hole edge. A value of the radius equal to 0.6mm seems to be appropriate to summarize all fatigue data in a quite narrow scatter band. © 2013 IMechE.