CRACK PROPAGATION UNDER FATIGUE LOADING

OBJECTIVE
To study crack propagation of specimen under dynamic loading in fatigue testing machine.

THEORY
In many daily applications, the machine components are loaded with constantly varying load. In such cases the failures
occurs at stress much less than its ultimate tensile strength or even yield strength. Such a failure is termed as the fatigue
failure.
CRACK PROPOGATION
For ductile metals, unlike failure because of gradual loading, the fatigue failure gives no prior warning hence it is
dangerous. The fatigue fracture has appearance similar to brittle fracture but development of failure is different in both
above cases. There are three distinct stages in case of fatigue failure. They are as follows
Stage
In first stage one or more micro-cracks are formed because of plastic deformation which usually extend to two to five
grains.
Stage
The cracks grow parallel to each other to form longitudinal ridges. The fracture surfaces formed because of crack are
smooth and parallel to maximum tensile strength.
Stage
The crack grows in last load cycle to give sudden failure. The fracture in this stage can be brittle or ductile or combination
of both. From fractured surface one can trace the origin of cracks if benchmarks exist, they are called chevron lines.
CRACK PROPOGATION RATE
Certainly in aircraft, but also in other structures as well, it is vital that engineers be able to predict the rate of crack growth
during load cycling, so that the part in question be replaced or repaired before the crack reaches a critical length. A great
deal of experimental evidence supports the view that the crack growth rate can be correlated with the cyclic variation in
the stress intensity factor. The equation is given as follows

dc
=A K m
dN

Where
c Crack legth
N Number of cycles
A & m Curve fitting coanstants
K Range of stress intensity factor
The law is popularly known as the Pariss law. The typical curve for Paris law looks as following

FIGURE 1: PARIS LAW FOR FATIGUE CRACK GROETH

As one can observe that initially the crack does not appear. But on its first appearance the crack propagates at very fast
rate. Then the crack growth rate increase steadily. The regime in which the crack rate increases steadily is known as the
Paris region. The behaviour is intuitionally expected because, with increase in crack length the area resisting the stress is
decreased and also the stress concentration factor increases.
EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS
In experiment, the crack length is measured against the number of cycle. The graph is plotted for number of cycles (c)
against the slope of the crack length vs number of cycle curve.

OBSERVATION TABLE
Following are the observation tables for two different materials
MATERIAL 1
MATERIAL 2

MATERIAL SPECIFICATION
1
Length
15.0 cm
2
Width
28.00 mm
MATERIAL
SPECIFICATION
3
Thickness
4.08 mm
1OBSERVATION
Length DATA
15.0 cm
2SR NO Width
28.00
mm
NO OF
CRACK
3
Thickness
4.62
mm
CYCLES
LENGTH
OBSERVATION DATA
(mm)
SR
CRACK1
1 NO NO OF
400
CYCLES
LENGTH
2
1600
1
(mm) 1
3
3200
14
600
34
4200
25
800
95
4300
36
100
22
4400
7
47
1200
28
4500
10
8
4600
14
9
4700
17
10
4800
28

GRAPHS
Following two graphs plot crack length and crack propagation rate as function of number of cycles.

Following is the graph for 2nd material.

CONCLUSION
1) The rate of crack propagation increases with number of cycles for material 1 which is expected and reasons are
explained in the theory.
2) Due to insufficient number of data points one cannot make any conclusive statement about nature of material 2