The Effect of Mean Stress on Fatigue Crack Propagation in Plates Under Extension and Bending

Abstract

An earlier study of fatigue crack propagation in thin plates under fluctuating plane extension and cylindrical bending is extended to include the effect of nonzero mean stress. The theoretical considerations are applied to existing data and to new data obtained from 2024-T3 bare and clad aluminum specimens subjected to fully reversed and nonsymmetric bending loads. For the ranges studied, the agreement between the data and the model developed seems to be very good.