Fatigue Degradation of Materials as a Tool for Damage Assessment

Abstract

Damage assessment of components or systems is strongly related to the way components fail. Thus, an appropriate understanding of failure degradation of components is necessary. Furthermore, most of the failures are related to fatigue cracks that develop on components under service. This paper is concerned with the fatigue degradation of metallic components. Its emphasis is on the different ways in which the fatigue damaging mechanisms occur, being the main responsible for the failure of components. This paper has two main sections: one section deals with the fatigue mechanisms and their definition; the second section focuses on the failure analysis of components affected by those mechanisms.