This article provides ASTM standard definitions for fatigue and describes the approaches that are used to design finite or infinite life, used in a complementary sense in fatigue design. It explains four distinct phases of fatigue: nucleation, structurally dependent crack propagation, crack propagation, and final instability. The article discusses the significant role that fatigue plays in industrial design applications.

This article provides a review of fatigue test methodologies and an overview of general fatigue behavior, fatigue crack initiation and fatigue crack propagation of advanced engineering plastics. It also describes the factors affecting fatigue performance of polymers and concludes with information on fractography, a useful tool in failure analysis.

Failure of structural polymeric materials under cyclic application of stress or strain is a subject of industrial importance. The understanding of fatigue mechanisms (damage) and the development of constitutive equations for damage evolution, leading to crack initiation and propagation as a function of loading or displacement history, represent a fundamental problem for scientists and engineers. This article describes the approaches to predict fatigue life and discusses the difference between thermal and mechanical fatigue failure of polymers.

This article reviews generalized test methodologies for fatigue characterization of polymers and examines fatigue fracture mechanisms in different engineering plastics. It provides detailed micromechanistic images of crack-tip processes for a variety of semicrystalline and amorphous engineering polymers. The article describes fracture mechanics solutions and approaches to the fatigue characterization of engineering polymers when dealing with macroscale fatigue crack growth. It includes mechanistic images for high-density polyethylene, ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene, nylon 6, 6, polycarbonate, and polypropylene. The article describes the micromechanisms of toughening of plastics and uses a macroscale approach of applying fracture mechanics to the fatigue life prediction of engineering polymers, building on the mechanistic concepts. It also describes the factors affecting fatigue performance of polymers.

Fatigue crack growth rate testing and data analysis are performed to characterize the crack propagation resistance of material environment combinations in order to predict crack growth life under anticipated stress histories. This article presents analyses performed on the numerical output of crack growth rate tests, including the analysis framework for modeling fatigue crack growth rate data. It describes the numerical methods for calculating da/dN as a function of stress intensity factor. The article discusses the principles in fatigue crack growth damage analysis.