Optimisation of start and restart procedure in TMF fatigue testing

Thermomechanical fatigue is a technique that is going to be widely used for the characterisation of gas turbine components. As the experimental technique is quite complex, it requires a defined procedure to initialise the experiments. In particular the evaluation of the systematic temperature-mechanical strain shift due to the equipment response and the thermal strain compensation during thermal cycling, the verification of zero stress before starting have to be defined in order to produce TMF tests comparable from different laboratories.