Gamma based titanium aluminides have received considerable attention recently as candidate materials in gas turbine applications, particularly low pressure turbine blades (1–3). Their low density and high specific stiffness, result in potentially significant weight savings in structures such as gas turbine engines if substituted for current materials. Two �-TiAl microstructures are predominatel...

In this paper, a Paris law-based model is presented whereby crack propagation occurs under cyclic loading in air (fatigue) and in an aggressive environment (corrosion-fatigue) for the case of corner cracks (with a wide range of aspect ratios in the matter of the initial cracks) in finite-thickness plates of 316L austenitic stainless steel subjected to tension, bending, or combined (tension + be...

Plasticity-induced, roughness-induced and oxide-induced crack closures are reviewed. Special attention is devoted to the physical origin, the consequences for the experimental determination and the prediction of the effective crack driving force for fatigue crack propagation. Plasticity-induced crack closure under plane stress and plane strain conditions require, in principle, a different expla...

Single-crystal aluminas are being considered for use in the manufacture of prosthetic heart valves. To characterize such materials for biomedical application, subcritical crack growth by stress corrosion (static fatigue) and by cyclic fatigue has been examined in sapphire along (1100) planes in 24 degrees C humid air and 37 degrees C Ringer's solution (the latter as a simulated physiological en...

Porosity has been shown to affect the fatigue life of bone cements, but, although vacuum mixing is widely used to reduce porosity in the clinical setting, results have been mixed and the effects of porosity are not well understood. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of porosity using stress analysis and fracture mechanics techniques. The stress concentrations arising at voids ...

Bulk amorphous alloys, such as the Zr41.2Ti13.8Cu12.5Ni10Be22.5 (at.%) alloy, have received much interest lately, particularly for their commercial application in golf club heads. This study seeks to investigate the fatigue behavior of this Zr-based amorphous metal in the presence of air and sodium chloride solution, with the specific goal of identifying mechanisms of environmentally assisted f...

The objective of the current study is to determine the fatigue limit of a clean and high-performance material named as HSLA-100 steel and to compare the obtained fatigue limit with that of theoretically predicted fatigue limit by statistics of extreme value (SEV) method. Also, the size of inclusions located at the site of fatigue crack nucleation on the fracture surface of the fatigue test spec...

Due to cost and time limitations, experiments for fatigue crack growth are only feasible below certain cycle numbers. In this paper, it is investigated whether or not fatigue crack growth laws allow for an extrapolation of the statistics of the cycle number to reach a certain crack length from limited experimental data, and hence reduce costs.

This paper evaluates the effects of microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) on fatigue-crack growth of candidate materials useful in expanding bio-ethanol usage, including a storage-tank steel (ASTM A36) and two pipeline steels (API 5L X52 and X70). The microbiological species sampled and cultivated from an ethanol fuel production stream are responsible for both acetic acid and hydrogen su...

A cohesive fatigue-crack nucleation and growth model for ferroelectric materials under electro-mechanical loading is presented. The central feature of the model is a hysteretic cohesive law which couples the mechanical and electrical fields. This law can be used in conjunction with general constitutive relations of bulk behavior, possibly including domain switching, in order to predict fatigue ...