Small crack fatigue is a widely recognized problem in the fatigue of materials; however, there has been limited progress in developing methods for predicting small crack fatigue behavior. In this paper, small crack effects due to crack bridging are addressed. A fatigue threshold R-curve was measured for a 99.5% pure...
Crack bridging is an important source of crack propagation resistance in many materials and the bridging stress distribution as a function of crack opening displacement is widely believed to represent a true material property uninfluenced by sample geometry, loading conditions, and other extrinsic factors. Accordingly, accurate measurement of the bridging...