Lecture 5

Fatigue Failure I
Chapter 6

Lecture topic relevance

Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 (1988)
One fatality and 65 passengers and crew injured

Cause: small section on the roof ruptured caused by fatigue failure.

The cockpit door was gone resulting in an explosive decompression tearing off a large section of the plane

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 Lecture topic relevance

• Fatigue failure impacts economy

• 1982 US Government report
– The annual cost of fatigue materials is
around $100 billion; ~ 3% of GNP
– The $ figure arises from occurrence and
prevention of fatigue failure in ground
vehicles, rail vehicles, aircraft of all types,
bridges, cranes, offshore structures and a
miscellaneous machinery and equipment
of our everyday life

Lecture topic relevance

Drive shaft of Fan shaft
End of a motor shaft
steel-mill elevator

Crack initiated at the surface
by fretting corrosion which
reduced fatigue strength.
Surface is
• smoothest near the keyway
root
• rougher as crack grew
across shaft
Fatigue crack developed Fatigue crack developed due
due to to variable speed drive
• very loose coupling fit, • surface roughness across
where the hub repeatedly the shaft indicates the
drives the key against cause is fatigue forces.
the side of the keyway • 45 degree torsional-fatigue
failure

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 Chronology: milestone accident
Railroad car axle failure (1800s)

• The axle fixed to wheels turns with them

• First time seen with ductile steel
• Fully reversed cyclic loading makes the material
“crystalized” and become brittle
• Bending stress at any point of the surface of the axle
varies cyclically from positive to negative
• Rankine paper in 1843 attempted to clarify the reason

First investigation in the lab

• 1870: Wohler A. published the results from lab testing axles to failure
• The cause:
– Number of cycles of time varying stress
– Fatigue failure, the most common in machinery, occurs at stress below
the yield strength of the material
• Wohler founded the Endurance limit for steel
– Stress level which will tolerate millions of cycles of fully reversed stress
– Wohler’s S-N diagram became the standard way to characterize the
behavior of material under completely reversed loading and it is still in
use

uncorrected fatigue strength

uncorrected endurance limit

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 Fatigue failure
• Due to variable loading, with stress
amplitudes often well below the static
yield strength of the material. Hence,
using failure theories in CH 5 can Fatigue failure of
lead to unsafe designs a pedal crank

• Whether the material is brittle or

ductile, fatigue failure is sudden with
no warning (i.e: extremely dangerous!)

• Scientific knowledge on fatigue is

limited, yet mechanical parts still need
to be designed! lots of approximations
and empirical models

Mechanisms of fatigue failure

Bolt subjected to repeated bending
Crack initiation;
Initiation striations characterized
by smooth texture
Stage I (Short period)

Propagation
Slow crack propagation
Stage II Beachmarks (start/stop)
(Long period)
Rate of growth is 10-8 -
10-4 in / cycle
Fracture
Stage III
Fast, sudden (“brittle
type”) crack propagation
(rough and dull surface)
leading to final rupture
(Very fast)

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 Mechanisms of fatigue failure
• Fatigue failures always begin at a crack
• Cracks may be present in raw material used in fabrication (e.g.: inclusions)
• Cracks may be introduced during fabrication
• Cracks develop over time during cyclic loading or corrosion
• Cracks develop around stress concentrations
• Corrosion will accelerate this process considerably
• If a part containing a crack is in a
corrosive environment, the crack will
grow under static stress

What happen in case of compressive stresses?

Questions to address in this lecture

• What patterns of load trigger fatigue?

• Which mechanisms of fatigue failure exist?
• What fatigue-failure models have been
developed?
• How to measure fatigue failure?

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 Loading patterns:
a) general case, b) ship, c) commercial aircraft

• Semi-random nature
– Load waves don’t
repeat
– Limited data available

• We’ll look at more

simplified scenarios
reproducible in the lab
(Check next slide)

Cyclic stress patterns

in typical rotating machinery
 For free-notch elements
 max   min
Mean m 
2
Amplitude  max   min
a 
(Alternating) 2

stress range

Stress ratio  min

Rs 
 max
Amplitude ratio

 Stress patterns
 Fully reversed m  0
 Non zero mean m  0
 Released Tension  min  0
 Released Compression  max  0

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 Fatigue Design Categories
There are four basic categories that can be treated separately..
Category I: fully reversed uniaxial stresses (Bending, axial and
torsional loadings)  m  0
Category II: fluctuating uniaxial stresses (adds the complication
of mean stresses)
Fully reversed (III) and fluctuating (IV): present a recommended
“universal approach” that will work in all categories for most
common loading situations

L5-L6 L7

L8

Questions to address in this lecture

• What patterns of load trigger fatigue?

• Which mechanisms of fatigue failure exist?
• What fatigue-failure models have been
developed?
• How to measure fatigue failure?

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 Mechanisms of fatigue failure

Striations (not visible at

naked eye)

Beachmarks
(generally visible)

Fracture zone

Mechanisms of fatigue failure:

fatigue striations

(not visible at naked eye)

Load pattern

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 Beachmarks and fracture zone
with respect to load type

 Tension and compression  Reversed bending

alternation

Schematics of fatigue-fracture
surfaces for given load type

On fracture surface, we
can ideally observe
–crack initiation site
–crack propagation region
– fast fracture site
(catastrophic failure)

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 Questions to address in this lecture

• What patterns of load trigger fatigue?

• Which mechanisms of fatigue failure exist?
• What fatigue-failure models have been
developed?
• How to measure fatigue failure?

Fatigue failure models

• Fatigue Regimes
Based on the number of stress or strain cycles that the part is expected to
undergo in its lifetime, it is referred to either a low-cycle fatigue (LCF)
regime or a high-cycle fatigue (HCF) regime.

Low-cycle fatigue High-cycle fatigue

(LCF) (HCF)

No sharp separation

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 Fatigue failure models

Linear elastic
Stress-life (S-N) Strain-life (-N) fracture mechanics
LEFM
• For HCF • Good for LCF • Best for LCF
• Quite inaccurate • Based on strain • Most useful to
for LCF • Capture crack predict crack
• Based on stress, initiation propagation and
to keep very low • More complex to fatigue life
• Easy but most apply • Used with non
empirical destructive testing
• To calculate in aerospace
endurance limit or
fatigue strength

In this course, we’ll use the stress-life model, the most appropriate choice for the
majority of rotating machinery operating in high cycle regime

ASTM F1717 custom fatigue test

Standard Test Methods for Spinal Implant

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Questions to address in this lecture

• What patterns of load trigger fatigue?

• Which mechanisms of fatigue failure exist?
• What fatigue-failure models have been
developed?
• How to measure fatigue failure?

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 Experiments

• First we look at the cases of fully

reversed load
– Rotating beam, axial beam
• Then fluctuating load
– Combination of mean and alternating
stresses

Rotating beam test

• Moore experiment in the lab

One-half day to reach 106 cycles

and about 40 days to reach 108
cycles on one specimen

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 Rotating beam test

• Specimen
• carefully machined and polished
• rotated to all points on its surface subjected to cyclic, reversed stresses
• Four-point bending configuration
• bending moment constant with no transverse shear force
• Initial tests: low weight, then progressively increase weight for each of the
subsequent tests
• Outcome: S-N curve (Log-Log coordinates) for the material reporting
• Number of cycles to failure (N)
• Applied stress inducing failure (normalized failure strength, Sf / Sut )

Log-log S-N curves for wrought

steels of Sut < 200ksi

(With a Knee)
The knee defines an endurance limit Se' for the material, which is a
stress level below which it can be cycled infinitely without failure
Approximate endurance limit can be defined
for steels : Se' ≅ 0.5 Sut Sut < 200 ksi (6.2a)

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Steel:
Relation between Ultimate and Fatigue limit

The average behavior is a line

of slope 0.5 up to 200 kpsi.
(Se' ≅ 0.5 Sut )

Steels with higher ultimate

tensile strengths (Sut ≥ 200
ksi), endurance limit falls off.

for steels never exceeds 50%

of 200 kpsi we assume:
Se' ≅ 100 ksi
Sut ≥ 200 ksi
What is the effect of notches
and corrosion on Se' ???

Aluminum alloys:
Relation between Strength and Cycle
(Note the lack of a distinct Knee)

N = 5E8
• Aluminums do not have an endurance limit,
• fatigue strength Sf ’ is the average failure stress at N = 5E8 cycles

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 Aluminum:
Fatigue strength and ultimate strength

Aluminums do not have an endurance limit, thus their fatigue strength Sf ’ is

usually taken as the average failure stress at N = 5E8 cycles

The fatigue strength tracks the alloys’ static tensile strengths at a ratio of

Axial Fatigue tests

• Steel, Fully reversed axial vs. bending

(or fully reversed axial test)

• The axial data are seen to be at lower values than the rotating-beam data
• The fatigue strength in reversed axial loading may be from 10% to 30% lower
than the rotating-beam data for the same material
Explain why the fatigue strengths exhibited in the axial tests are typically
lower than those seen in the rotating beam test?

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 Axial Fatigue tests
• AISI 4130 steel: change in slope at 10^3
LCF HCF

endurance limit
for infinite life

Figure 6-13

Combined mean and alternating stress

• Effect of mean stress on alternating fatigue strength

When a tensile mean component of stress is added to the alternating component, the material
fails at lower alternating stresses than it does under fully reversed loading

Which line is used as a

design criteria ?

Ans:
Goodman line is safer
than Gerber line
Steels at 10^7 to 10^8 cycles

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 Recap
Lecture to be continued
• Next time, L6, we’ll complete
– Answer to the questions:
• How to estimate fatigue failure strength?
• and others

Design Question

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Design Question

Explain what happened here?

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