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Duality of fatigue failures of materials caused by Poisson defect statistics of competing failure modes

Nature Materials volume 4, pages 303–308 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

The statistical nature of failures of components subjected to fatigue loading is a major challenge in engineering applications. Here, we report an interesting fatigue phenomenon in which there is a 'duality' of the S–N fatigue data (S is stress and N is cycles to failure)—the grouping of data into two distinct S–N curves as a result of two competing failure modes. The proportions of failure by either mode are about the same and one cannot predict which failure mode will eventually dominate. This means that fatigue lives may be unpredictable in materials under certain application conditions and the consequences can be disastrous. Based on Poisson defect statistics and Monte Carlo simulations, we show that this phenomenon can arise from the Poisson distribution of low populations of microscale defects. An unexpected finding is that there should be a combination of average defect density and specimen area at which this phenomenon is observable in materials having sparsely populated defects.

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Figure 1: The duality of fatigue data caused by competing failure modes in the titanium alloy, Ti-10V-2Fe-3Al for two microstructures, B and E.
Figure 2: Micrographs illustrating the defect clusters and the corresponding crack-initiation sites from surface-initiated and interior-initiated failures.
Figure 3: The calculated probabilities for failures from surface and subsurface regions for varying defect densities.
Figure 4: The 2D Poisson spatial patterns of defects simulated using Lewis and Shedler algorithm24.
Figure 5: Cumulative probabilities of fatigue failures from surface-initiated and interior-initiated cracks for 20 simulations with 1,000 sequential sample patterns in each simulation.
Figure 6: Probability patterns for fatigue failures from surface and interior.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partly supported by AFOSR Grant: F49620-96-1-0102. C. Clay and P. M. Allen of TIMET, Henderson, Nevada, USA, supplied and helped tremendously in processing the Ti-10V-2Fe-3Al material. S. K. Jha conducted the experiments and G. T. Cashman, GE Transportation, Cincinnati, Ohio, kindly shared the data for the other materials referred to here.

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  1. Department of Metallurgical Engineering, 135 South 1460 East Rm. 412 The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 84112, Utah, USA

    K. S. Ravi Chandran

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Supplementary information, table S1, figures S1 and S2 (PDF 137 kb)

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Chandran, K. Duality of fatigue failures of materials caused by Poisson defect statistics of competing failure modes. Nature Mater 4, 303–308 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1351

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