Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Fatigue Test: Objectives
Fatigue Test: Objectives
failure is brittle in nature and does not involve gross plastic deformation even in metals
that behave in a ductile manner under static loading. Hence, fatigue failure occurs
suddenly and can cause catastrophic consequences.
Test Description
You can perform a simple fatigue test with
your hands. Take a thin wire and bend it
back and forth many times, the wire will
break after a number of cycles depending
on the stress level. Increasing the applied
load will reduce the number of cycles
required to break the wire and you can test
this by increasing the displacement of your
hands during bending. However, for good
Figure 5.2: Fatigue rotating
testing we need more accurate control of
bending machine
the cyclic load and this can be done by a
rotating bending machine, shown in Figure
5.2. In this machine, a cylindrical smooth specimen is mounted and loaded from both
ends using rotating chucks (see figure 5.3). A weight is suspended from one side of the
specimen to vary the bending stresses
experienced by the specimen surface.
Initially, the specimen will experience
tensile stresses at its top surface and
compressive stresses at its bottom. As the
specimen rotates 180 degrees, the stresses
will be reversed and the top will be under
compressive stresses while the bottom will
be under tensile stresses. When the
Figure 5.3: Mounted fatigue
specimen completes one full rotation, the
specimen
specimen
surfaces
would
have
experienced one full loading cycle. The
maximum bending stress acting on the
specimen surface is given by
= 32 M/d3
where, = the maximum bending stress
M = the bending moment at the specimen cross-section (weight*distance)
d = specimen diameter
The same test is repeated for many specimens each conducted at different stress level and
the number of cycles it would take to fail is recorded. The S-N curve is a plot of the
applied stresses versus the logarithm of the number of cycles to failure (N) for each
specimen. The ASTM standards E466 and E468 are to be consulted for further details of
the test.