Polycrystal plasticity simulations of fretting fatigue

Fretting fatigue is often the root cause of the nucleation of cracks at attachments of structural components. In fretting, cyclic plastic deformation, cumulative deformation and wear or damage occurs within depths of only several grains. Thus, it is important to resolve the deformation at the scale of individual grains in order to understand the crystallographic orientation dependence of cyclic plasticity, the heterogeneity of subsurface plasticity, and its relation to surface contact conditions. In this study, we employ state-of-the-art computational crystal plasticity constitutive laws that account for discreteness of grains, crystallographic surface texture, and heterogeneous plastic deformation at the scale of grains. The results of simulations are compared with carefully controlled and monitored fretting fatigue experiments.