INTRODUCTION

• Fatigue is the weakening of a material caused by repeatedly applied

loads. It is the progressive and localized structural damage that occurs
when a material is subjected to cyclic loading.
• Fatigue failure is defined as the tendency of a material
to fracture by means of progressive brittle cracking under repeated
alternating or cyclic stresses of an intensity considerably below the
normal strength.
MECHANISM OF FATIGUE FAILURE
The three steps of fatigue failure includes
• Crack nucleation :starts with nucleation of crack at some point in the
bulk.
• Crack growth: the developed crack grows in a direction perpendicular
to the applied load.
• Fracture: the crack the grows with every cycle of stress, the increment
is indicated as minute ripple.
Modes of applying a force for crack
propagation
Theories of fatigue failure
Griffith-Orowan’s Theory: Metal consists of external inclusions or areas
of stress concentration.
If the total plastic strain in this region exceeds the critical value then a
crack is formed.
Wood theory: the back and forth fine slip movement of fatigue could
build up notches or ridges at the surface.
These notches acts as stress raisers and in this way starts fatigue cracks
which leads to fracture.
 GRIFFITH THEORY OF BRITTLE FRACTURE
A brittle material contains a population of fine small cracks and flaws
which produces a stress conc. of sufficient magnitude so that theoretical
cohesive strength is reached in localized regions at a nominal stress
which is well below the theoretical value.
The experiments showed that the product of the square root of the flaw
length (a) and the stress at fracture (σf) was nearly constant, which is
expressed by the equation:
Griffith established the following criteria for the propagation of
crack
• A crack will propagate when the decrease in elastic strain
energy is atleast equal to create a new crack.
• If an increment increase in crack length produce no change in
the total energy of the system i.e the increased surface energy
is compensated by a decrease in elastic strain energy.
Assumptions

• Crack is elliptical in shape.

• Thickness of material is unity.
• Crack runs from front to back face.
• Crack tends to increase its length in transverse direction.
• Linear elastic medium with infinite stresses at the crack tip
 Paris Law
• Paris' law (also known as the Paris-Erdogan law) is a crack growth rate
equation that relates the stress intensity factor range to sub-critical crack
growth under a fatigue stress regime.

• Where a is the crack length and da/dN is the fatigue crack growth rate
• The alternating stress intensity is the difference between maximum and
minimum stress intensity factors for each load cycle defined as
Geometrical representation of crack growth with respect to the alternate stress intensity, along with the
representation of Paris' curve in the linear region of Regime B.
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