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Crystallography of Fatigue Crack Propagation in Precipitation-Hardened Al-Cu-Mg/Li

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Abstract

A combined electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD)/stereology method successfully quantifies the orientation of fatigue crack surfaces for Al-Li-Cu and Al-Cu-Mg alloys stressed at low ΔK, in which deformation is localized in slip bands and cracking is highly faceted. The method orients features as small as ∼1 μm in complex microstructures. Vacuum fatigue facets align within 15 deg of up to four variants of {111} slip planes, governed by the distribution of crack tip resolved shear stress. The small fraction of precisely oriented {111} facets suggests that cracking involves complex intraband and multiple-band interface paths. Water vapor and NaCl solution affect a similar dramatic change in the crack path; near-{111} facets are never observed, at odds with mechanisms for H-enhanced slip localization and associated slip band cracking. Rather, two environmental crack facet morphologies, broad flat and repeating step, exhibit a wide range of orientations between {001} and {110}, as governed by crack tip resolved normal stresses. The repetitive stepped facets appear to contain areas parallel to {100}/{110} on the ∼1-μm scale, coupled with surface curvature consistent with a mechanism of discontinuous fatigue crack growth involving H-enhanced {100}/{110} cleavage and intermingled crack tip plasticity. Broad-flat faceted regions are parallel to a variety of planes, consistent with a mechanism combining high crack tip tensile stresses and H trapped at the dislocation structure from cyclic deformation, within 1 μm of the crack tip.

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Notes

  1. JEOL is a trademark of Japan Electron Optics Ltd., Tokyo.

  2. While grain and facet orientations are not measured at exactly the same point, the method uncertainty of 2.8 deg includes 1.6 deg, to account for such intragranular grain orientation differences.[32] For a specific facet location, larger uncertainty in grain orientation may arise due to a microstructure that is nonrandomly distributed.

  3. The X and Y axes are parallel to the crack propagation direction and the loading axis, respectively for this mode I situation. The Z axis is perpendicular to the X-Y plane. In this study, X//T, Y//L, and Z//S.

  4. This analysis is relatively insensitive to the specific choice of θ over which the resolved shear stress is averaged. Values of θ up to ±π/2 were analyzed and these expanded the region of high shear stress until it formed an annulus about the center of the stereographic projection in Fig. 13(a), rather than the two lobes to the right and left of the center. Facet observations also form a ring about the center of the stereographs, but have the highest density in the regions highlighted by the selected θ from −π/4 to +π/4.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported financially by the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Grant No. F46920-03-1-0155, with Drs. C.S. Hartley, J. Tiley, and B. Conner as scientific officers, and by the ALCOA Technical Center, with Dr. G.H. Bray as technical monitor.

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  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22904-4745, USA

    YunJo Ro (Graduate Student), Sean R. Agnew (Associate Professor) & Richard P. Gangloff (Ferman W. Perry Professor and Chair)

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  1. YunJo Ro
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Correspondence to Richard P. Gangloff.

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Manuscript submitted October 13, 2006.

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Ro, Y., Agnew, S. & Gangloff, R. Crystallography of Fatigue Crack Propagation in Precipitation-Hardened Al-Cu-Mg/Li. Metall Mater Trans A 38, 3042–3062 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11661-007-9344-x

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