Fatigue.

The concept of “fatigue” arose several times in the Module on Fracture (Module 23), as in the growth of cracks in the Comet aircraft that led to disaster when they became large enough to propagate catastrophically as predicted by the Griffith criterion. Fatigue, as understood by materials technologists, is a process in which damage accumulates due to the repetitive application of loads that may be well below the yield point. The process is dangerous because a single application of the load would not produce any ill effects, and a conventional stress analysis might lead to a assumption of safety that does not exist. In one popular view of fatigue in metals, the fatigue process is thought to begin at an internal or surface flaw where the stresses are concentrated, and consists initially of shear flow along slip planes. Over a number of cycles, this slip generates intrusions and extrusions that begin to resemble a crack. A true crack running inward from an intrusion region may propagate initially along one of the original slip planes, but eventually turns to propagate transversely to the principal normal stress as seen in Fig. 1.