Fatigue Crack Paths 2003

Extrusion direction

Particle diameter, Dc (microns)

Figure 1. Particle distribution, 100x magn.

Figure 2. Particle size distribution.

Specimen and Crack Length Monitoring

A C Tspecimen geometry with a length W =24mmand thickness B = 7 m mwas adopted

in order to optimise the use of the available material (Fig. 3). The applied load was

controlled by means of 3000N load cell in order to ensure adequate sensitivity and

precision.

10 m m

Figure 3. C Tspecimen adopted in this work.

Since the small dimensions of the specimen did not allow to mount the standard clip

gage for C O Dmeasurement, the crack length was monitored during the test with the

back-face-strain-gage (BFSG) technique. In this technique, a strain gage is glued to the

back face of the specimen, as shown in Fig. 3, and a compliance-like value, C, can be

determined from the back-face strain (ε) vs load (P) data: