Experimental and crystal plasticity modelling study on the crack initiation in micro-texture regions of Ti-6Al-4V during high cycle fatigue tests

Micro-textured regions (MTRs) are the presence of large regions of α grains aggregates with strong local texture, which are detrimental to the fatigue performances in titanium alloys. This work proposes an EBSD map-image based crystal plasticity model to study the fatigue crack initiation in MTRs. Crystal plasticity simulations reveal that the crack initiation may be attributed to the significantly high plastic strain accumulated on prismatic a slip systems leading to significantly high dislocation pile-ups, and high stress concentrations on the cluster of hard grains leading to the stress redistribution and cleavage fracture of the specimen.