Understanding the surface features of fatigue fractures: How they describe the failure cause and the failure history

Most of us have been exposed to fatigue failures since we first started looking at broken pieces. In many cases, the first explanation of a failure began with a well-intentioned person explaining that a component had “crystallized” because it was a piece of defective steel. However, as we know, virtually all structural metals are crystalline, and after working with fatigue analysis for a while, it becomes apparent that defective materials are...