Experiment and simulation of high‐cycle corrosion fatigue damage evolution and corrosion pit tolerance analysis of crack nucleation

Abstract

Abstract Based on the elasto‐plastic damage constitutive model, a continuum nonlinear damage evolution model for the high‐cycle corrosion fatigue of the API X65 pipeline steel is proposed. Firstly, a series of experiments are carried out to determine the corrosion fatigue damage parameters of X65 steel in the artificial seawater, then the corrosion fatigue damage model is used in the finite element (FE) analysis to predict the crack nucleation life of high‐cycle corrosion fatigue. In order to consider the influence of corrosion pit on the crack nucleation of corrosion fatigue, a user‐subroutine UMESHMOTION provided by the general software ABAQUS is used to construct a numerical model of damage evolution with the corrosion pit effect considered on the API X65 steel. Numerical results show that the numerical model considering the effect of damage and corrosion pit can better predict the crack nucleation life of the API X65 steel than that considering only the damage effect.