As a first step towards a new crack healing methodology for cyclic loading, this paper examines two promising crack-tip shielding mechanisms during fatigue of a microcapsule toughened epoxy. Artificial crack closure is achieved by injecting precatalyzed monomer into the crack plane to form a polymer wedge at the crack tip. The effect of wedge geometry is also considered, as dictated by crack lo...

The role of grain bridging in affecting the initial rising portion of the R-curve and the transient, non-steady-state behavior of short cracks during (cyclic) fatigue-crack propagation has been quantitatively examined in a 99.5% pure alumina. Fatigue-crack growth properties for both long and short ( af < 2 mm) cracks emanating from machined notches (root radius, 15–150 m) were investigated, whe...

The mechanisms of fatigue-crack propagation in ceramics and intermetallics are examined through a comparison of cyclic crack-growth behavior in ductile and brittle materials. Crack growth is considered to be a mutual competition between intrinsic mechanisms of crack advance ahead of the crack tip, which promote crack growth, and extrinsic mechanisms of crack-tip shielding behind the tip, which ...

The relationships between the fatigue crack growth rate ( d a / d N ) and stress intensity factor range ( Δ K ) are not always linear even in the Paris region. The stress ratio effects on fatigue crack growth rate are diverse in different materials. However, most existing fatigue crack growth models cannot handle these nonlinearities appropriately. The machine learning method provides a flexibl...

The present paper examines crack growth in a range of aerospace and automotive structural adhesive joints under cyclic-fatigue loadings. It is shown that cyclic-fatigue crack growth in such materials can be represented by a form of the Hartman–Schijve crackgrowth equation, which aims to give a unique and linear ‘master’ representation for the fatigue data points that have been experimentally ob...

Fatigue is the major threat in service of steel structure subjected to fluctuating loads. With the additional effect of corrosion and presence of weld joints the fatigue failure may become more critical in structural steel. One of the apt examples of such structural is the sailing ship. This is experiencing a constant stress due to floating and a pulsating bending load due to the waves. This pa...

Fatigue crack propagation in 3Y-TZP was investigated using controlled surface flaws. A unique growth law strongly dependent on the maximum stress intensity factor and quadratically dependent on the amplitude of the range of stress intensity factor was established. This growth law was found to apply for both surface flaws and internal flaws and could be used to predict fatigue lifetime. The pres...

An assessment of the effects of microstructure on room temperature fatigue threshold and crack propagation behaviour has been carried out on microstructural variants of U720Li, i.e. as-received U720Li, U720Li-LG (large grain variant) and U720Li-LP (large intragranular coherent γ′ variant). Fatigue tests were carried out at room temperature using a 20Hz sinusoidal cycling waveform at an Rratio=0...

Self-healing polymers, based on microencapsulated dicyclopentadiene and Grubbs' catalyst embedded in the polymer matrix, are capable of responding to propagating fatigue cracks by autonomic processes that lead to higher endurance limits and life extension, or even the complete arrest of the crack growth. The amount of fatigue-life extension depends on the relative magnitude of the mechanical ki...

This paper proposes a reliable and cost-effective two-phase methodology to predict crack propagation life in generic two-dimensional (2D) structural components. First, the usually curved fatigue crack path and its stress-intensity factors are calculated at small crack increments in a specialized finite-element software, using automatic remeshing algorithms, special crack tip elements and approp...