Experimental evidence that electrical fatigue failure obeys a generalized Coffin-Manson law

The empirical Coffin-Manson law has been used to characterize the low-cycle mechanical fatigue failure of metallic materials for decades. Our experimental studies reported in this letter have shown that the electrical fatigue failure in dielectrics can be well described by a fitting function having the same mathematical expression as that of the Coffin-Manson law. This observation indicates that the physical mechanism beneath the formation and evolution of atomic disordered structures, the key factor influencing both mechanical and electrical fatigue, might be the same. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.