Fatigue Crack Propagation and Applied Stress Range—An Energy Approach

Using the saturation of hysteresis energy absorption as a criterion for fatigue crack propagation, the rate of crack propagation in a thin and wide metal sheet under repeated axial loading is found to be proportional to the square of the applied stress range. The local stress and strain fields adjacent to the crack tip are employed to compute the energy density. The analytical results correlate very well with the experimental results on 2024-T3 aluminum alloy.