Near Surface Crack Initiation Under Contact Fatigue

The present paper extends the dislocation dipole accumulation model to describe crack initiation in contact fatigue. The fatigue life under contact loading is calculated from an elastic solution. The plastic deformation may be taken into account by considering multi-slip layers. The present calculations show a qualitative consistency with experimental observations, although some additional parameters, such as the reversibility of dislocation pileup, are needed to make the theoretical prediction more comparable to the experimental data.