Lecture 15

Fatigue of Engineering
Materials

Jayant Jain

Assistant Professor,
Department of Applied Mechanics,
IIT Delhi, Hauz Khas, 110016

Vibration and Resonance

Loading and unloading a part is never completely
reversible energy is always lost this fact is
pronounced when loading is in vibration

Damping coefficient
Measures the degree to which
a material dissipates vibrational
energy

Loss coefficient
Fraction of the stored
energy not returned on
unloading

Materials: engineering, science, processing and design, 2nd edition Copyright (c)2010 Michael Ashby, Hugh Shercliff, David Cebon

Applications in which resonance or fast

elastic response is required (bells,
high-speed relays and springs) require
materials with low .
Applications in which it is desirable to
damp vibration (sound isolation of
buildings, suppression of vibration in
machine tools) use material
with high .

Fatigue
Fatigue is failure that occurs in structures that undergo
repeated cyclic stress, for example bridges and connecting
rods

Bridge

Connecting rod

Types of Cyclic Loading

(a) Low amplitude acoustic vibration
(b) High-cycle fatigue: cycling below
the yield strength
(c) Low-cycle fatigue: cycling above
the yield strength but below the
the tensile strength

High-cycle fatigue loading is most significant in

engineering terms
Materials: engineering, science, processing and design, 2nd edition Copyright (c)2010 Michael Ashby, Hugh Shercliff, David
Cebon

Fatigue
Fatigue failures occur due to cyclic loading at
stresses below a materials yield strength
Depends on the amplitude
of the stress and the number
of cycles
Loading cycles can be in
the millions for an aircraft;
fatigue testing must employ
millions of fatigue cycles
to provide meaningful
design data
Materials: engineering, science, processing and design, 2nd edition Copyright (c)2010 Michael Ashby, Hugh Shercliff, David
Cebon

Fatigue test
A common method of testing fatigue resistance is the
Wohler rotating rod test.
One end of the specimen is mounted in a rotating chuck
and a load suspended from the other end.
The specimen experiences cyclic forces, from tension to
compression in a sinusoidal cycle, as it rotates.

S-N Curves
Fatigue characteristics are measured and plotted
on S-N curve

R value of -1 indicates
the mean stress is zero
Endurance limit e: stress amplitude below which fracture does
not occur at all or only after a very large number of cycles (>107)
Materials: engineering, science, processing and design, 2nd edition Copyright (c)2010 Michael Ashby, Hugh Shercliff, David
Cebon

Fatigue of cracked components

Large structures-particularly welded structures such as
bridges, ships, oil rigs and nuclear pressure vessels always
contain cracks
All we have to make sure that the size of these cracks is
less than the critical crack size to avoid any catastrophic
failure
We need to determine the safe life of the structure i.e.
how many number of cycles structure can last prior to failure

Fatigue of cracked components

Cyclic stress intensity factor

Its value increases with time because

crack grows in tension

Because cracks don't

propagate in compression

Fatigue of cracked components

Crack growth rate is give by;

Threshold value: below which

crack does not grow

Typical
values of
m = 2.5-6
Paris
region

a0 and af is the initial and final

crack length. At af crack becomes
unstable
We now have an expression for the
fatigue life of a component

Catastrophic failure
occurs when Kmax = Kc

Fatigue crack-growth rates for

precracked material

Fatigue mechanism: LCF

Uncracked component
LCF: Plastic strains > elastic strains
app > Y
General plasticity roughens the
surface and a crack forms there
propagating along a slip path and
then by the mechanism normal
to the tensile axis
Intrusions and protrusions: Crack
nucleating sites

Fatigue mechanism: HCF

HCF: Elastic strains > Plastic strains Uncracked component
app < Y
When the stress is below the
general yield

Any notch, scratch or change of

section stress concentrates there

A crack initiates in the zone of stress

concentration

Sudden changes of section or

scratches are very dangerous in
HCF
How cracks form in high-cycle fatigue

Question
A high strength steel plate is subjected to
fatigue with a maximum tensile stress
of 120 MPa and a minimum compressive
stress of 40 MPa. If the edge crack length
is 5 mm and fracture toughness of steel
plate is 70 MPam1/2, estimate the fatigue
life. The Value of constant C can be taken
as 1.5x10-9 and m = 3.