Stress gradient effects in fretting fatigue

This paper highlights the importance of high stress gradients in fretting fatigue. These pose a serious difficulty in attempting to employ plain fatigue data to predict fretting fatigue performance. Stress gradient effects may also be responsible for a size effect which is found to occur in many fretting situations. Here we review a number of possible approaches for dealing with high stress gradients. We then explore a notch analogy which might be used to generate equivalent stress gradients in plain fatigue. Some sample comparisons are given for typical dovetail geometries. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.