| Abstract: | The fatigue behavior of an ethylene-hexene copolymer was investigated. The effects of R, frequency, relative times under the maximum and minimum stress, and waveform were measured. The phenomenological aspects were related to the microscopic aspects of the failure process. The maximum stress produces damage by disentangling the molecules in the fibrils of the craze and the minimum stress produces damage by bending the fibrils. The net damage, which is a product of these two damage processes, has been represented by a simple equation which accounts for the phenomenological observations. |
