Failure Fracture Fatigue - An introduction

The theory of linear elastic fracture mechanics is discussed and extended to account for a small zone of plastic yielding at the crack tip.Stable and unstable crack growth is investigated as well as crack growth at cyclic loading. Then the focus is turned to fatigue analysis. After an introduction to governing mechanisms, high-cycle and low-cycle fatigue of uniaxial structural members is discussed. Finally, the more advanced topic of fatigue under multiaxial loading is treated.