Prediction of crack growth and fatigue life estimation of metals using linear/nonlinear acousto-ultrasound methods is an ongoing issue. It is known that by measuring nonlinear parameters, the relative accumulated fatigue damage can be evaluated. However, there is still a need to measure two crack propagation states to assess the absolute residual fatigue life. A procedure based on the measureme...

Over the past 10 years, the supereleastic nickel-titanium alloy Nitinol has found widespread application in the manufacture of small-scale biomedical devices, such as self-expanding endovascular stents. Although conventional stress/strain-life (S/N) analyses are invariably used as the primary method for design against fatigue loading and for predicting safe lifetimes, fracture mechanics-based m...

NASA has conducted an Airframe Structural Integrity Program to develop the methodology to predict the onset of widespread fatigue damage in lap-splice joints of fuselage structures. Several stress analysis codes have been developed or enhanced to analyze the lap-splice-joint configuration. Fatigue lives in lap-splicejoint specimens and fatigue-crack growth in a structural fatigue test article a...

The strength and fatigue behavior of bulk fused silica is well understood in terms of the growth of microcracks under the combined influence of stress and environmental attack. The behavior of high strength, flaw free silica optical fiber shows significant differences from the bulk material for poorly understood reasons making long term predictions unreliable. It is known that silica fiber stre...

In this paper we examine the conditions for surface topography evolution and crack growth/fracture during the cyclic actuation of polysilicon microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) structures. The surface topography evolution that occurs during cyclic fatigue is shown to be stressassisted and may be predicted by linear perturbation analyses. The conditions for crack growth (due to pre-existing o...

The growth of slant cracks by fretting fatigue of a half plane in contact with a flat rounded pad was studied. The mode I and mode II stress intensity factors for cracks of various lengths and directions were calculated using the semi-analytical method of the distribution of dislocations, and their cumulative effect on the crack growth was investigated using the strain energy density criterion....

The aim of this study is to evaluate the microstructures, tensile lap shear strength, and fatigue resistance of 6022-T43 aluminum alloy joints welded via a solid-state welding technique-ultrasonic spot welding (USW)-at different energy levels. An ultra-fine necklace-like equiaxed grain structure is observed along the weld line due to the occurrence of dynamic crystallization, with smaller grain...

Estimating and tracking crack growth dynamics is essential for fatigue failure prediction. A new experimental system— coupling structural and crack growth dynamics—was used to show fatigue damage accumulation is different under chaotic (i.e., deterministic) and stochastic (i.e., random) loading, even when both excitations possess the same spectral and statistical signatures. Furthermore, the co...

The effects of environmental media on the corrosion fatigue fracture behavior of 25CrMo steel were investigated. The media include air, and a 3.5 wt.% and a 5.0 wt.% NaCl solutions. Experimental results indicate that the media induces the initiation of corrosion fatigue cracks at multiple sites. The multi-cracking sites cause the changes in the crack growth directions, the crack growth rate dur...