No abstract

One common mode of failure that occurs in rolling bodies such as gears, bearings and rails is due to the fatigue process. Several research workers suggest that rolling contact fatigue cracks are subjected to mixed mode I and II loading cycles. It is believed that the correct modelling of loading cycles can help us to study the mechanics of crack growth because fatigue comprises a major safety consideration in the design process. Experiments have been performed under nonproportional mixed‐mode I and II loading cycles with fixed degrees of overlap, so that coplanar cracks were produced. Three empirical crack propagation laws have been established which are related to both mode I and mode II effective stress intensity factor ranges.

Two methods were studied for determining crack closure and locking effects under combinations of mixed mode I and II loading, namely the strain gauge and the surface replica methods. They demonstrated that strain gauges are able to detect the mode I crack closure but not mode II crack locking. As an alternative, the surface replica method is suggested as a practical technique for measuring mode II crack locking effects. The effective mode II stress intensity factor range can be estimated by comparison of the actual measured sliding range between a pair of crack faces and the theoretical sliding range.