Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden to Washington Headquarters Service, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington, VA 22202-4302, and Numerical studies predict that increased constraint and smaller size will accelerate fatigue failure due to changes in plastic deformation. Strain gradients significantly affect the process. Measurements of toughness and fatigue crack growth resistance for the model material system are reported. New test protocols for the commonly used 4 point bend delamination test are developed such that both cracks can be propagated and the number of test data obtained is doubled. The novel approach is also essential for fatigue crack growth. While crack growth resistance was rather independent of the thickness of and fatigue crack growth rates were found to be dependent of film thickness. The dependence of the failure behavior on film thickness arises primarily due to enhanced crack path deflection for decreasing film thickness. Material separation in fracture and fatigue is characterized through a cohesive zone law. The model captures the Paris-law type response obtained in experiments, and also predicts that for thinner films the tendency to crack. Damage tolerant design requires accurate data on residual strength and fatigue crack growth resistance. Both quantities, however, depend on constraint and size of the structure considered. While this has been accounted for in residual strength analysis in the past, the present work provides enabling technologies to solve this problem for fatigue. With the conventional approach to fatigue crack growth, the transferability of data from lab to field, or between specimens and structures is not ensured. Thus, coefficients in the Paris law need to be determined experimentally for each level of constraint or each size of interest. It is, however, not ensured that even a large set of experiments will be able to capture all possible load scenarios. The cohesive zone model approach is provided here as alternative. Once cohesive zone parameters are determined, the dependence of fatigue crack growth on constraint and size emerges as the natural outcome of the analysis without the need to further model modifications.
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