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a,*
, N. Kawagoishi b, Q. Chen
Department of Civil Engineering and Mechanics, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kagoshima University, Kagoshima 890-0065, Japan
Received 9 December 2002; received in revised form 30 May 2003; accepted 17 June 2003
Abstract
In this study, the eect of pre-existing corrosion pits on the fatigue behavior of 7075/T6 aluminium alloy in very long
life range and in the near threshold regime was investigated by using piezoelectric accelerated fatigue test. The results
indicate that the presence of pre-existing corrosion pits, produced by 1-day, 4-day, and 7-day immersion in salt water
signicantly reduces the fatigue life of the aluminum alloy by a factor of 10100.
2003 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Pitting corrosion; Very long life fatigue; 7075/T6 aluminum alloy; Near-threshold crack growth
1. Introduction
Pitting (localized) corrosion leading to fatigue
crack initiation and crack growth is considered to
be among the most signicant damage mechanisms in aging structures [13]. Prior-corrosion
related fatigue process consists mainly of pitting
nucleation, pit growth, transition from pitting to
fatigue crack initiation, short crack growth and
long crack growth [35]. Pits almost always initiate
at some chemical or physical heterogeneity at the
surface, such as inclusions, second-phase particles,
aws, mechanical damage, or dislocations. The
aluminum alloys contain numerous constituent
particles, which play an important role in corro-
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +86-28-85404890; fax: +86-2885405534.
E-mail addresses: wangqy@scu.edu.cn, wangqy2000@
hotmail.com (Q.Y. Wang).
sion pit formation [2]. It is well known that corrosion pitting has a strong eect on fatigue life of
structural Al alloys [15]. Under the interaction of
cyclic load and the corrosive environment, cyclic
loading facilitates the pitting process, and corrosion pits, acting as geometrical discontinuities,
lead to crack initiation and propagation and then
nal failure. The presence of localized corrosion
pits modies the local stress and may ultimately
shorten fatigue life and lower the threshold stress
for crack initiation and propagation.
Although much fatigue data of aluminium alloys have been published, the most experimental
data in the literature have been limited to fatigue
lives up to 107 cycles. In many industries (such as
aircraft, automobile, railway and oshore structures), however, the required design lifetime of the
components often exceeds 109 cycles. In recent
years there has been a development of interest in
very long life fatigue between 107 and 1010 cycles
for various high strength steels [610] and very
1359-6462/$ - see front matter 2003 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S1359-6462(03)00365-8
712
Table 2
Chemical composition (wt%)
Si
Mn
Cu
Mg
Zn
Cr
Fe
0.10
0.03
1.47
2.56
5.46
0.20
0.25
2. Experimental procedure
2.1. Material and specimen
The material used in this study was an extruded
Al alloy 7075/T6. The mechanical properties and
the chemical composition are shown in Tables 1
and 2, respectively.
Plate dog-bone fatigue specimens designed to
resonate longitudinally at 19.5 kHz were machined
with single edge notch having length of 1 mm,
radius of 0.5 mm and stress concentration factor of
3.05. The resonance length of the specimen was
calculated using an analytical method [12]. All
specimens were 114.6 mm in length and 16 mm in
width, with a nominal gage thickness of 3.0 mm.
All the specimen surfaces were mechanically
polished with 300-, 400-, 600-, and 1200-grade
papers. For pitting corrosion studies, the polished
specimens were immersed in a physiological saline
solution (3.5% NaCl) for 1, 4, and 7 days, respectively. The typical appearance of the pits on
the surface of the specimens after exposure for
various durations is shown in Fig. 1. The pits are
random in size and irregular in shape. The
Table 1
Mechanical properties
E (GPa)
q (kg/m3 )
rT (MPa)
rY (MPa)
72
2800
764
691
713
Fatigue tests were interrupted at certain numbers of cycles in order to make replicas of the mid
surface of the specimens. For each specimen test,
more than 30 replicas were taken for detecting
crack initiation and monitoring crack growth. The
minimum detectable crack length is within 0.05
mm. Fig. 2 shows examples of optical micrographs
of replicas of the small cracks initiated from the
notch in the near-threshold FCG test.
Two series of fatigue tests were conducted in
this investigation. In order to understand how the
various exposure durations aect the fatigue life,
the rst test was carried out under a constant load
amplitude at an initial stress amplitude of 80 MPa
to obtain crack length against number of cycles
data. As the second, FCG experiments were performed under variable stress intensity amplitude to
obtain crack growth behavior of small and large
cracks in the near threshold regime. The FCG
curves were obtained by shedding the load in small
steps until the threshold crack growth rates (less
than 1010 m/cycle) were reached. Then, the load
might be increased again to obtain higher crack
growth rates. The stress intensity factor at the
crack tip was approximated by the formula [14]:
r
a
E
p
K
f
U
1
0
1 m2 a
w
where
a
a
a 2
a 3
f
3:98
0:64
1:73
w
w
w
w
a 4
1:96
w
Crack length(mm)
7-day
4-day
1-day
0-day
6
4
2
0
1.E+05
1.E+06
1.E+07
1.E+08
1.E+09
Number of cycles
714
Fig. 5. FCG behavior of small and large cracks in 4-day, and 7day corroded Al 7075/T6.
4. Conclusions
1. Fatigue properties are signicantly aected by
the pre-existing corrosion pits, specially, crack
715
716
surface pre-existing pits might act as stress concentrators [5,17]. Fatigue crack may initiate from
pre-existing pits followed by two (cleavage and
ductile) fracture modes during crack growth. The
experiment results shows that FCG rates of small
cracks in the aluminum alloy are greater than those
of large cracks at almost the same stress intensity
factor range, DK, and some small cracks may grow
at DK values below the large crack threshold in the
near threshold crack growth regime.
2. Fatigue failure process under prior-corrosion
eects represented as the total number of cycles,
comprises the cycles needed to form a critical pit
crack transition size and the cycles needed to
propagate the crack to failure. The ongoing work
is aimed to develop a quantitative evaluation of
the formation and growth of pits, pit-crack transition, and crack growth processes.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the support of
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under
the Grant-JSPS-P01042, and Chinese SRF for
ROCS.
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