Long crack

The anomalous propagation of short cracks shows generally exponential fatigue crack growth but the dependence on stress range at high stress levels is not compatible with Paris’ law with exponent m=2. Indeed, some authors have shown that the standard uncracked SN curve is obtained mostly from short crack propagation, assuming that the crack size a increases with the number of cycles N as da/dN=H\Delta\sigma^h where h is close to the exponent of the Basquin’s power law SN curve.