Microcracking of type 304 stainless steel at 538°C has been studied, in particular, the initiation, growth and coalescence, of fatigue microcracks on smooth specimens via surface replicas and photomicrographs. Quantitative information, such as, initiation period, growth and coalescence behaviour, statistical distributions of crack length, density of cracks, distribution patterns and crack growth properties, were obtained. Knowledge of these parameters is critical for the application of fracture mechanics to fatigue life assessment and the damage evaluation of structures at elevated temperature.

The effect of thickness on the mechanical properties of Al 6K21-T4 sheet specimens under uniaxial tension was investigated. In order to reduce the thickness of the specimens without changing the microstructure and grain size, chemical etching was carried out, resulting in Al sheets ranging from 0.40 mm to 1.58 mm in thickness. Additionally, the effect of surface roughness was determined by finite element (FE) calculations performed using FE code MARC 2007. Tensile specimens of varying surface roughness were modeled and simulated. An analysis of the combined effects of the thickness and surface roughness revealed that the yield and tensile strengths decreased when the number of grains over the thickness was decreased. The ductility also decreased when reducing the thickness. An FE simulation showed that both the surface roughness and thickness affected the flow-curve shape. Moreover, the effect of the surface roughness tended to increase when decreasing the sheet thickness of specimens having the same roughness.

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Fatigue characteristics of A7075-T651 aluminum material were studied with surface treatment of shot peening. The fatigue life was characterized by two fatigue testing methods, ultrasonic fatigue test (UFT, 20 kHz) and the rotary-bending fatigue test (RFT, 53 Hz). The fatigue life improvement was confirmed by rotary bending fatigue tester. However, the surface modification effects were hardly observed by UFT method. The RFT results validate that the fatigue properties of RFT show a fine congruence regardless of the test machine types. The results of hardness, compressive residual stress, fatigue strength, and mechanical properties of specimen were improved by shot peening.

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