A model has been created to allow the quantitative estimation of the fatigue crack growth rate in steels as a function of mechanical properties, test-specimen characteristics, stress-intensity range and test-frequency. With this design, the remarkable result is that the method which is based on steels, can be used without modification, and without any prior fatigue test, to estimate the crack growth rates in nickel, titanium and aluminium alloys. It appears therefore that a large proportion of the differences in the fatigue crack growth rate of metallic alloys can be explained in terms of the macroscopic tensile properties of the material rather than the details of the microstructure and chemical composition.
Keywords: Fatigue Crack Growth, Neural Network, Steel, Superalloys, Titanium Alloys, Aluminium Alloys