Zusammenfassung
Basquin's law of fatigue states that the lifetime of the system has a
power-law dependence on the external load amplitude, t(f) similar to
sigma(-alpha)(0), where the exponent alpha has a strong material
dependence. We show that in spite of the broad scatter of the exponent
alpha, the fatigue fracture of heterogeneous materials exhibits
universal features. We propose a generic scaling form for the
macroscopic deformation and show that at the fatigue limit the system
undergoes a continuous phase transition. On the microlevel, the fatigue
fracture proceeds in bursts characterized by universal power-law
distributions. We demonstrate that the system dependent details are
contained in Basquin's exponent for time to failure, and once this is
taken into account, remaining features of failure are universal.
Nutzer