The fatigue behavior of V-notches in presence of residual stresses: recent developments and future outcomes

Abstract

Residual stresses, arising from welding processes or nonhomogeneous plastic deformations, broadly influence the high cycle fatigue behavior of mechanical components. The presence of V-notches leads to singular residual stresses ahead of the notch tip and the asymptotic stress field can be described by the notch stress intensity factor (NSIF). However, plastic effects induce redistribution of residual stresses during cyclic loading and this variation is accounted in several numerical models developed for the calculation of the residual NSIFs. Due to the development of these models, the fascinating issue of predicting the fatigue strength of pre-stressed notched components has gained widely attention by the researchers and new approaches were recently developed and some of them are here reviewed.