1994 Volume 80 Issue 11 Pages 860-865
A metallic gasket for the cylinder head of the automobile engine is made of an austenitic stainless steel sheet. It commonly has a press-formed bead which seals the high pressure gas in the combustion chamber. Because the fatigue characteristics of the sheet with the bead do not correspond to those of the plain sheet without bead, it is not easy to judge the suitability of the materials for the metallic gasket. We investigated the fatigue behavior for the sheet with the bead, especially the number of crack origins and the fatigue crack propagation rate. As a result, the fatigue strength at the number of 106 cycles was not dependent on the mean stress but the stress amplitude. In addition, the discrepancy between the fatigue characteristics of the sheets with and without the bead resulted from fine wrinkle-like bands of plastic deformation which occurred at a part of bead profile foot during the bead-forming.
