A study on the fatigue crack growth in 9% Ni steel plate: Growth rate of surface crack in a plate under arbitrarily combined tension and bending

Abstract Cyclic growth rate of a surface crack is complicated by the three dimensional stress field around the crack and also by an interaction expected between the growth rate at every position on the contour. An analysis, based on the total energy around a surface crack, derived a correlation between strain energy release rate and cyclic increase in cracked area. And the correlation was confirmed by experiments conducted, with 9% Ni steel plate, under tension, bending and combined tension and bending.