Nanocrystalline metals have been shown to exhibit unique mechanical behavior, including break-down in Hall-Petch behavior, suppression of dislocation-mediated plasticity, induction of grain boundary sliding, and induction of mechanical grain coarsening. Early research on the fatigue behavior of nanocrystalline metals shows evidence of improved fatigue resistance compared to traditional microcrystalline metals. In this review, experimental and modeling observations are used to evaluate aspects of cyclic plasticity, microstructural stability, crack initiation processes, and crack propagation processes. In cyclic plasticity studies to date, nanocrystalline metals have exhibited strongly rate-dependent cyclic hardening, suggesting the importance of diffusive deformation mechanisms such as grain-boundary sliding. The cyclic deformation processes have also been shown to cause substantial mechanicallyinduced grain coarsening reminiscent of coarsening observed during large-strain monotonic deformation of nanocrystalline metals. The crack-initiation process in nanocrystalline metals has been associated with both subsurface internal defects and surface extrusions, although it is unclear how these extrusions form when the grain size is below the scale necessary for persistent slip band formation. Finally, as expected, nanocrystalline metals have very little resistance to crack propagation due to limited plasticity and the lack of crack path tortuosity among other factors. Nevertheless, like bulk metallic glasses, nanocrystalline metals exhibit both ductile fatigue striations and metal-like Paris-law behavior. The review provides both a comprehensive critical survey of existing literature and a summary of key areas for further investigation.

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Fatigue failure due to repetitive loading of metallic devices is a pervasive engineering concern. The present work reveals extraordinary fatigue resistance in nanocrystalline (NC) alloys, which appears to be associated with the small (<100 nm) grain size inhibiting traditional cyclic damage processes. In this study, we examine the fatigue performance of three electrodeposited NC Nibased metals: Ni, Ni-0.5Mn, and Ni-22Fe (PERMALLOY). When subjected to fatigue stresses at and above the tensile yield strength where conventional coarse-grained (CG) counterparts undergo low-cycle fatigue failure (<10 4 cycles to failure), these alloys exhibit exceptional fatigue lives (in some cases, >10 7 cycles to failure). Postmortem examinations show that failed samples contain an aggregate of coarsened grains at the crack initiation site. The experimental data and accompanying microscopy suggest that the NC matrix undergoes abnormal grain growth during cyclic loading, allowing dislocation activity to persist over length scales necessary to initiate a fatigue crack by traditional fatigue mechanisms. Thus, the present observations demonstrate anomalous fatigue behavior in two regards: (1) quantitatively anomalous when considering the extremely high stress levels needed to drive fatigue failure and (2) mechanistically anomalous in light of the grain growth process that appears to be a necessary precursor to crack initiation.

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