Fatigue initiation in heterogeneous brittle materials (Q1184431)

The purpose of this paper is to present a statistical approach of the initiation stage in fatigue derived from a unified framework of the failure probability in the case of monotonic and cyclic loadings. We will show in particular that the iso-probability curves in a Wöhler diagram, have a shape, which is independent of the initial statistical distribution of defects. Applications of this study are to be found in the case of engineering ceramics. The first section of this paper is devoted to the introduction of our model for the evolution of an initial defect subjected to a cyclic loading with a uniform stress. In the second section, this mesoscopic model is applied to the analysis of a structure \(\Omega\) of volume \(V\) subjected to any stress field and divided into a large number of representative volume element \(V_ 0\).