Scatter of fatigue data owing to material microscopic effects

A common phenomenon of fatigue test data reported in the open literature such as S-N curves exhibits the scatter of points for a group of same specimens under the same loading condition. The reason is well known that the microstructure is different from specimen to specimen even in the same group. Specifically, a fatigue failure process is a multi-scale problem so that a fatigue failure model should have the ability to take the microscopic effect into account. A physically-based trans-scale crack model is established and the analytical solution is obtained by coupling the micro- and macro-scale. Obtained is the trans-scale stress intensity factor as well as the trans-scale strain energy density (SED) factor. By taking this trans-scale SEDF as a key controlling parameter for the fatigue crack propagation from micro- to macro-scale, a trans-scale fatigue crack growth model is proposed in this work which can reflect the microscopic effect and scale transition in a fatigue process. The fatigue test data of aluminum alloy LY12 plate specimens is chosen to check the model. Two S-N experimental curves for cyclic stress ratio R=0.02 and R=0.6 are selected. The scattering test data points and two S-N curves for both R=0.02 and R=0.6 are exactly re-produced by application of the proposed model. It is demonstrated that the proposed model is able to reflect the multiscaling effect in a fatigue process. The result also shows that the microscopic effect has a pronounced influence on the fatigue life of specimens.