Moises Quintana Ramrez

Crack Growth Process

Crack initiation
The crack initiation period includes the cyclic slips, the crack nucleation
process, and the initial micro-crack growth, the crack initiation period may
cover a significant part of the fatigue life of the materials.
Crack initiation is a consequence of micro-plasticity, it is initiated in the grains
located in the surface of the material, and this is because the strain of these
grains is less restricted than the others grains, taking into account one side of
the grain is restricted by other grains and the other restrained by the
environment.
Micro- plasticity is due to the distribution of shear stress in the microstructure
(size, shape, and crystallographic orientation of the grains). At some grains the
previous conditions might be more favourable and hence slip steps will be
created.
Slip steps consist of the exposition of rims of fresh material to the environment.
These rips of fresh material will suffer two changes that would make the
process irreversible, one of them is oxidation, and the other one is strain
hardening. The accumulation of these rips is called a slip band.
Slip bands, surface roughness, corrosion pits, fretting fatigue damage,
inclusions, and geometric discontinuities such as holes or notches are common
points for crack nucleation.
It is important to mention that defects such as inclusions can cause
microcracks in the subsurface of the material, making fatigue not only a
problem originated in the surface of materials.
The micro-crack growth has a tendency of growing along the slip bands. The
crystallography of the materials thus has a dominant effect in this period of
crack growth. Some of the aspects of crystallography to be considered are the
type of crystal lattice, elastic anisotropy, allotropy, slip systems, ease of cross
slip, grain size and shape, variation of the crystal orientation from grain to
grain.
An important thing to consider is that during micro scale growing the cracks
have a tendency to grow at 45 referred to the applied stress, after this period
the crack tends to grow at a normal angle.

Crack growth
The first important aspect about this period is that it is no longer affected by
the material surface conditions, the second one is that the crack usually grows
perpendicular to the main principal stress. With every cycle of loading in
fatigue, plastic deformation is produced at the tip of the crack, the marks left

Moises Quintana Ramrez

by this are called striations. Each striation correspond to one cycle of loading. It
is important to remind that this period of the crack process usually covers a
little part of the whole fatigue life of the materials.
The striations continue cycle by cycle until the failure of the material. The
environment has an important effect of the propagation of a crack, from the
substance surrounding the material to the temperature of the environment
have an important effect on crack propagation.