Fatigue and collapse of cyclically bent strip of amorphous solid

Abstract

Fatigue caused by cyclic bending of a piece of material, resulting in its mechanical failure, is a phenomenon that had been studied for ages by engineers and physicists alike. In this letter we study such fatigue in a strip of an athermal amorphous solid. On the basis of atomistic simulations we conclude that the crucial quantity to focus on is the accumulated damage. Although this quantity exhibits large sample-to-sample fluctuations, its dependence on the loading determines the statistics of the number of cycles to failure. Thus we can provide a scaling theory for the Wöhler plots of mean number of cycles for failure as a function of the loading amplitude.