Computer Simulation of Fatigue Failure in Amorphous Solids

Fatigue failure occurs in solids upon cyclic loading, after a number of cycles of stress/strain. The number of cycles to failure grows larger as a limiting amplitude of stress/strain, the fatigue limit, is approached from above. Although yielding behaviour of amorphous solids under cyclic deformation has been investigated through computer simulations actively in recent years (e. g., [1]), the corresponding phenomenon of fatigue failure, and more specifically, the dependence of the number of cycles to failure and the mechanisms thereof, have received relatively less attention. We perform cyclic shear deformation of glasses over a range of strain amplitudes and investigate the dependence of the number of cycles to failure on the amplitude of deformation. We perform a detailed investigation of the spatio-temporal variation of the stresses, energies and structure, and interpret results in terms of recent theoretical approaches to understanding yielding and fatigue failure in amorphous solids [2,3].