Residual strain distribution around a fatigue-crack tip determined by neutron diffraction

An analysis of residual stress, one of the contributory factors to the crack tip driving force, is extremely important to probe the fatigue crack growth mechanism and to further develop the life prediction methodology. Since fatigue crack growth is governed by crack-tip plasticity and crack closure in the wake of the crack tip, the investigation of residual stain/stress field in both behind and in front of the crack tip is crucial. In the current work, a 304L stainless steel compact-tension specimen is pre-cracked under constant-amplitude cyclic loading. Neutron diffraction is employed to directly measure the three orthogonal residual strain fields with 1-mm spatial resolution as a function of distance from the crack tip. The mapping results show that the three orthogonal residual-strain distributions around the crack tip depend on the stress multiaxiality, not following a single Poisson relationship to each axis.