Development of an Analytical Method for TMF of ICE Turbo Charger

Within increasingly competitive and demanding requirements in terms of efficiency, performance, and costs, a constant effort to optimize analysis and production processes is indispensable in order to meet internal, market, and customer demands. It becomes essential to reduce margins of uncertainty to provide clear answers. Unfortunately, in the realm of physical phenomena, high degrees of uncertainty are inherent to the phenomena themselves, prompting the search and the development of increasingly predictive models and methods to simulate phenomena in order to reduce any real event to a simulation easily replicable at a lower cost. A particular case is that of thermo-mechanical fatigue (TMF), a definition that includes a condition where we see a juxtaposition of thermal and mechanical loads. This is a case study that is different from a classical problem of isothermal fatigue and adds a level of complexity in the estimation of fatigue life. It is therefore impossible to predict with an absolute degree of certainty how a certain material behaves with given loading conditions. The purpose of this thesis work is to create a tool that allows the user to have a quick estimation of thermo-mechanical fatigue life of a component, implementing models that are mostly analytical in nature or require very few experimental parameters, as well as propose new methods or approaches to already known models. This was done through the development of a script in python and the creation of a user interface, allowing the user to have an easy-to-use tool to guide design choices during the first stages of the development of a project.