The Influence of Residual Stress on Fatigue Cracking

Abstract

The influence of residual stress on fatigue crack growth was experimentally and analytically investigated for surface cracks. Fatigue tests were performed on straight pipes of low-carbon steel with a circumferential inner surface crack in laboratory air environment. Some of the test pipes had been subjected to special heat treatments so as to have compressive or tensile residual stresses along inner surface. The results show that the compressive residual stress remarkably suppresses the surface crack growth, while the tensile residual stress does not accelerate the crack growth very much. The crack growth analyses were conducted by the application of power relationship between ΔK and da/dN . The stress intensity factors due to the nonlinear stress field were calculated by the weight function method. The analyses resulted in a confirmation of the behavior of the crack growth observed in the experiments.