Validation of a high-cycle fatigue model via calculation/test comparisons at structural scale: Application to copper alloy sand-cast ship propellers

An in-house developed software is proposed to study structures made of cast alloy and subjected to high-cycle fatigue. This in-house developed software is based on the implementation of a probabilistic two-scale model for high cycle fatigue life prediction. To validate the proposed approach, calculation/test comparisons at the scale of an engineering component (i.e., copper alloy sand cast ship propellers) have been performed. So, the first part of the present paper concerns the description of the model for fatigue life prediction and of the fatigue tests performed on two marine propellers. In a second part, the performance of the proposed model is estimated by comparing experimental and theoretical results in the case of full-scale fatigue tests. The results are then discussed and analyzed. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.