Abstract
Abstract A statistical investigation of the fatigue crack initiation and growth process is conducted in this paper. A total of 102 replicate constant-amplitude crack initiation and growth tests were designed and carried out on Ly12-CZ aluminium alloy. According to the post-mortem fractographic examination by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), some qualitative observations of the spatial correlation between fatigue striations are developed to reveal the statistical nature of the intrinsic material inhomogeneity during the crack growth process. From the experimental data, the distributions of crack initiation life N i and growth life N g are found to be accepted as log-normal distributions, and the statistical characteristics of crack growth rate d a d N are also investigated. All of these results would be able to provide solid test foundation for the study of probabilistic fatigue, probabilistic fracture mechanics, fatigue reliability and its engineering applications.
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