Influences of Plasticity-Induced Crack Closure on Fatigue Crack Healing of Carbon Steel With Heat Treatment

Healing technology for metallic materials is an important subject in terms of long-term reliability and durability of structural members, a healing technology to heal fatigue crack by applying heat treatment at annealing temperature level has been discovered. In this study, the influences of plasticity-induced crack closure on healing were evaluated by obtaining the crack opening load during the pre-crack introduction and evaluating the fatigue crack propagation characteristics before and after the healing heat treatment, using compact tension specimens made of carbon steel with different test conditions. As a result, the specimen with high crack opening load showed high healing effect and were able to heal up to 95% of the pre-crack length. This suggested that the residual compressive stress due to the plasticity-induced crack closure accelerates the solid-state diffusion bonding during the crack healing process and this leads to the improvement of the healing effect.