The influence of bending loading on surface fatigue crack growth life

Engineering structures often serve under complex fatigue loading and the most common of which are tension and bending loading, or their combination. Fatigue cracks always initiate as surface and other three dimensional (3D) cracks and most of the fatigue life of structures spends on 3D crack growth, but fatigue crack propagation curves of materials are widely obtained using through-the-thickness specimens. In this work, a 3D fracture mechanics based method is developed to evaluate surface crack propagation life under combined tension and bending loadings by considering the plasticity induced fatigue crack closure. The method is validated firstly against available experimental data of surface fatigue cracked plates under the combined loadings, and then applied to predict fatigue crack propagation life of surface cracked railway axles under rotating bending. It is shown that the method can make prediction of life within 0.80 to 1.08 of the test life, and the predicted shape evolution of surface crack agrees well with experimental observation. With a modification of short crack closure being made and an equivalent initial crack being assumed, the proposed method can be extended to fatigue life prediction. It is found that the influence of bending loading on fatigue life increasing for larger initial cracks, especially in the submillimeter range. This fracture mechanics based method can serve as a unified way to calculate fatigue crack growth life as well as fatigue life of practical structures under both tension and bending loadings by use of the material crack growth curves obtained with straight-through cracked standard specimens.