Fatigue of Materials and Structures

The design of mechanical structures with improved and predictable durability cannot be achieved without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of fatigue damage and more specifically the relationships between the microstructure of materials and their fatigue properties. Written by leading experts in the field, this book (which is complementary to Fatigue of Materials and Structures: Application to Damage and Design, also edited by Claude Bathias and André Pineau), provides an authoritative, comprehensive and unified treatment of the mechanics and micromechanisms of fatigue in metals, polymers and composites. Each chapter is devoted to one of the major classes of materials or to different types of fatigue damage, thereby providing overall coverage of the field.

The book deals with crack initiation, crack growth, low-cycle fatigue, gigacycle fatigue, shorts cracks, fatigue micromechanisms and the local approach to fatigue damage, corrosion fatigue, environmental effects and variable amplitude loadings, and will be an important and much used reference for students, practicing engineers and researchers studying fracture and fatigue in numerous areas of mechanical, structural, civil, design, nuclear, and aerospace engineering as well as materials science.

Claude Bathias is Emeritus Professor at the University Paris 10-La Defense. He started his career as a research engineer in the aerospace and military industry where he remained for 20 years before becoming director of the CNRS laboratory ERA 914 at the University of Compiegne. He has launched two international conferences about fatigue: International Conference on the Fatigue of Composite Materials (ICFC) and Very High Cycle Fatigue (VHCF).

André Pineau is Professor at Mines ParisTech and a member of the French Academy of Engineering. He has published about 300 papers in international journals and edited or co-edited 10 books. His main research fields are phase transformations, fatigue and fracture of metallic materials.