FATIGUE CRACK THEORY THE PARIS LAW

GROWTH

Life prediction for fatigue cracks was made very much easier and far more
quantitative, in the 1960's when Paris [1] postulated that the range of stress
intensity factor might characterise sub-critical crack growth under fatigue loading
in the same way that K characterised critical, or fast fracture. He examined a
number of alloys and realised that plots of crack growth rate against range of
stress intensity factor gave straight lines on log-log scales. This implies that:

For the first time, it became possible to make a quantitative prediction of

residual life for a crack of a certain size. This simply required finding limits on
the integration in terms of crack size, which could be done by finding the final
size which caused fast fracture from the relationship between fracture toughness
and crack size:

Separation of the variables a and N and substitution for the range of stress
intensity by the equivalent equation in terms of stress and crack size gives:

It was later realised that this so-called 'law' applied to growth rates in the range
of perhaps 10-3 mm/cycle to 10-6 mm/cycle, and that the fatigue crack growth
rate curve was sigmoidal in shape when growth lower and higher than this
range were included. Typical data for austempered ductile iron in air, as a
function of stress ratio (minimum stress in cycle divided by maximum stress in
cycle - a measure of mean stress in the fatigue cycle) is shown in the figure
below.
The lower growth rate region is termed the threshold regime, because growth
rates drop off steeply and the crack becomes essentially non-propagating. This
represents a change in mechanism from double shear continuum growth to
single shear non-continuum growth. The higher growth rate regime is where
values of maximum stress intensity in the fatigue cycle are tending towards the
fracture toughness and static modes of fracture (cleavage, intergranular) are
adding to the fatigue induced growth rates.

The Paris law remains a very useful relationship, however, because it covers the
range of growth rates most useful to engineering structures, and because an
extrapolation into the threshold regime gives a conservative estimate for the
remaining life. This development was crucial to the adoption of defect-tolerance
concepts and the implementation of a retirement-for-cause philosophy.

Further information from some early papers dealing with characterisation of

fatigue crack growth rates in fracture mechanics terms can be found in
references 2 to 6. There are a number of modern texts which deal with fatigue,
and a useful starting point is reference 7.

References

1. P Paris and F Erdogan (1963), A critical analysis of crack propagation laws,

Journal of Basic Engineering, Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers, December 1963, pp.528-534.

2. T C Lindley, C E Richards and R O Ritchie (1976), Mechanics and

mechanisms of fatigue crack growth in metals: a review, Metallurgia and Metal
Forming, September 1976, pp.268-280.

3. J Schijve (1978), Four lectures on fatigue crack growth, Engineering

Fracture Mechanics, Vol. 11 No. 1 pp.169-206.

4. R P Wei (1978), Fracture mechanics approach to fatigue analysis in design,

Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology, April 1978, Vol. 100, pp.113-
120.

5. R O Ritchie (1980), Application of fracture mechanics to fatigue, corrosion

fatigue and hydrogen embrittlement, Analytical and Experimental Fracture
Mechanics, Proceedings of the International Conference held in Rome, June
1980, G C Shih (editor), Sijthoff and Nordhoff.

6. R J Allen, G S Booth and T Jutla (1988), A review of fatigue crack growth

characterisation by linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) Parts 1 and 2,
Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures, Vol. 11 No. 1
pp.45-69 and No. 2 p.71-108.

7. S Suresh (1998), Fatigue of Materials 2nd edition, Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, England.