The recently developed nanobainitic steels show high strength as well as high ductility. Although this combination seems to be promising for fatigue design, fatigue properties of nanostructured bainitic steels are often surprisingly low. To improve the fatigue behavior, an understanding of the correlation between the nanobainitic microstructure and the fatigue limit is fundamental. Therefore, o...

This paper deals with the effect of several residual stress profiles on the fatigue crack propagation in prestressing steel wires subjected to tension loading or bending moment. To this end, a computer program was developed to evaluate the crack front evolution on the basis of the Walker law. Results demonstrate that the absence of residual stresses makes the crack propagate towards a preferent...

This research comprises a study of the effect of heat treatment on fatigue behavior of (A193-51T-B7) alloy steel. Two heat treatment processes were conducted, namely, annealing and quenching followed by tempering at 200C. All fatigue tests were carried out using a rotary bending machine with constant stress ratio, R=-1. The eddy current probe was used to measure the crack length propagation. Fr...

This paper reviews the capabilities of a plasticity-induced crack-closure model to predict fatigue lives of metallic materials using “small-crack theory” for various materials and loading conditions. Crack tip constraint factors, to account for three-dimensional stateof-stress effects, were selected to correlate large-crack growth rate data as a function of the effective-stress-intensity factor...

Piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) are commonly used for detecting Lamb waves for structural health monitoring application. However, in most applications of active sensing, the signals are of high-amplitude and easy to detect. In this article, we have shown a new avenue of using the PWAS transducer for detecting the low-amplitude fatigue-crack related acoustic emission (AE) signals. Mult...

Failure analysis and fatigue life prediction are necessary and critical for engineering structural materials. In this paper, a general methodology is proposed to predict fatigue life of smooth and circular-hole specimens, in which the crack closure model and equivalent initial flaw size (EIFS) concept are employed. Different effects of crack closure on small crack growth region and long crack g...

Studies on the growth of small cracks have led to the observation that fatigue life of many engineering materials is primarily “crack growth” from micro-structural features, such as inclusion particles, voids, slip-bands or from manufacturing defects. This paper reviews the capabilities of a plasticity-induced crack-closure model to predict fatigue lives of metallic materials using “small-crack...

The fundamentals associated with acoustic emission monitoring of fatigue crack initiation and propagation of Ti-6AI-4V were studied. Acoustic emission can detect and locate incipient fatigue crack extensions of approximately 1 0 gm. The technique therefore can serve as a sensitive warning to material failure. There are three distinct stages during which acoustic emission is generated. These sta...

It is generally accepted that the fatigue crack growth (FCG) depends mainly on the stress intensity factor range (DK) and the maximum stress intensity factor (Kmax). The two parameters are usually combined into one expression called often as the driving force and many various driving forces have been proposed up to date. The driving force can be successful as long as the stress intensity factor...

A technique to heal a fatigue crack in austenitic stainless steel SUS316 by applying a controlled, high-density pulsed current was developed. A surface-activated pre-coating (SAPC), which eliminates the oxide layer and coats a Ni film on the crack surface, was used to improve the adhesion between crack surfaces. Cracks were observed by scanning electron microscopy before and after the applicati...