• Steel and Composite Structures
• /
• v.50 no.3
• /
• pp.363-374
• /
• 2024

The fatigue life of steel wire is affected not only by fatigue load, but also by corrosion environment in service period. Specially, the corrosion pit will lead to stress concentration on the surface of steel wire inducing the formation of fatigue cracks, and the fatigue cracks will accelerate the corrosion process. Therefore, the corrosion fatigue of steel wire is a coupling effect. In this study, the corrosion-fatigue coupling life curve is derived with considering corrosion-fatigue pitting stage, corrosion-fatigue short crack stage and corrosion-fatigue long crack stage. In addition, the stress concentration factors of different corrosion pits are calculated by COMSOL software. Furthermore, the effect of corrosion environment factors, that is, corrosion rate, corrosion pit morphology, frequency and action factor of fatigue load, on fatigue life of steel wire is analyzed. And then, the corrosion-fatigue coupling life curve is compared with the fatigue life curve and fatigue life curve with pre-corrosion. The result showed that the anti-fatigue performance of the steel wire with considering corrosion-fatigue coupling is 68.08% and 41.79% lower than fatigue life curve and fatigue life curve with pre-corrosion. Therefore, the corrosion-fatigue coupling effect should be considered in the design of steel wire.

• Corrosion Science and Technology
• /
• v.7 no.5
• /
• pp.243-251
• /
• 2008

Magnesium alloys become popular research topic in last decade due to its light weight and relatively high strength-to-weight ratio in the energy aspiration age. Almost all structure materials are supposed to suspend stress. Magnesium is quite sensitive to corrosive environment, and also sensitive to environmental assisted cracking. However, so far we have the limited knowledge about the environmental sensitive cracking of magnesium alloys. The corrosion fatigue (CF) test was conducted. Many factors' effects, like grain size, texture, heat treatment, loading frequency, stress ratio, strain rate, chemical composition of environment, pH value, relative humidity were investigated. The results showed that all these factors had obvious influence on the crack initiation and propagation. Especially the dependence of CF life on pH value and frequency is quite different to the other traditional structural metallic materials. In order to interpret the results, the electrochemistry tests by polarization dynamic curve and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were conducted with and without stress. The corrosion of magnesium alloys was also studied by in-situ observation in environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM). The corrosion rate changed with the wetting time during the initial corrosion process. The pre-charging of hydrogen caused crack initiated at $\beta$ phase, and with the increase of wetting time the crack propagated, implying that hydrogen produced by corrosion reaction participated in the process.