Impact of the interface on the fatigue life of steel-based explosively welded heterostructured plates

Abstract Melted zones, microcracks, shear bands, and elastic incompatibility of explosively welded materials are features that may initialize cracks at the interface and reduce fatigue strength. This study aims to determine the effect of interfacial defect-like structures on the fatigue strength of explosively welded corrosion-resistant plates. Cyclic axial loading was applied to seven distinct layer-by-layer compositions of Ti Gr 1, Zr 700 alloys, and carbon steels. The interfacial wave height as a metric of potential fatigue life influencing factors along with measured strain amplitude was applied as the input quantities for the Machine Learning based model, i.e. the Gaussian process for regression (GPR). This is a novel and successful application of GPR to estimate the effect of interfacial wave height on the fatigue life of explosively welded plates. For the first time, the effect of the interface feature on fatigue life was estimated quantitatively. The Digital Image Correlation technique was applied to measure the field of cyclic strain for the purpose of verifying if a single strain amplitude is representative of a heterostructured plate. It was found that interfacial wave height is an important feature and its increase by 100 µm reduces the fatigue life of analysed plates by 36%. Additionally, to validate the applicability of explosively welded plates to engineering structures under cyclic loading, the experimental fatigue lives were compared with the design curve of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) code.