TABLE OF CONTENTS In the past century and a half much has been written on the problem of metal fatigue, and it has only been possible to describe some of the more important metal fatigue topics in this book. One might argue from the infrequency of catastrophic metal fatigue failures in structures and components that the problem is no longer serious. Clear explanations are usually found for the major failures that do occur, with human error often being involved. However, lesser metal fatigue failures, often unrecognised unless they happen to be seen by a fatigue specialist, are a common and expensive nuisance. General awareness of the dangers of metal fatigue has greatly increased. By and large the problem can be contained, if not solved; but the price is eternal vigilance.
Metal fatigue is very much a descriptive subject. Metallurgical descriptions are concerned with the effect of fatigue loading on the state of the material. Mechanical descriptions are concerned with matters such as the number of cycles to failure, or the rate of propagation of a fatigue crack, and are the more useful from an engineering viewpoint. The multi volume work on structural integrity, edited by Milne et al. (2003) includes encyclopaedic coverage of many metal fatigue topics. These are mostly written as state of the art reviews, and inevitably some of the material has already been outdated. It is probably impossible to write a comprehensive standard text on metal fatigue. Perhaps the closest approach is the book by Suresh (1998). On...
