Analysis of failure behaviors of dovetail assemblies due to high gradient stress under contact loading

Two key questions of fretting fatigue of dovetail assemblies should be still investigated to meet the engineering requirement. One is describing the high gradient stress at the edges of contact in blade/disc assembly exactly, especially introducing the plasticity. The other is finding the suitable parameters to correlate the fretting failure under contact loading. Finite element (FE) models of one dovetail assembly with different mesh sizes are used to calculate the plastic contact stresses near the edges of the contact zone, and then a failure model is established to predict the initiation of a crack.