Fatigue of advanced materials

The development of toughened ceramics over the past 10 to 15 years is arguably one of the most important materials breakthroughs of this century. Monolithic and composite ceramic materials having fracture toughnesses up to an order of magnitude higher than those available 20 years ago have been produced using technologies based on scientific understanding and micromechanical models for in situ phase transformation, fiber bridging, ductile-particle toughening, and other toughening mechanisms. The irony of this, however, is that although ceramics can now be seriously considered for many structural applications, they can also, contrary to popular belief, be susceptible to degradation under cyclic fatigue loading. This is true even when the loading is fully compressive. As a result, a great deal of attention is now being paid to ceramic fatigue, largely because of the importance of cyclic loading in many of the potential applications for ceramics, such as gas-turbine and reciprocating engines. However, because the field is in its infancy, only limited fatigue property data have been documented, understanding of salient fatigue mechanisms has not been achieved, and the design of ceramic microstructures for optimum fatigue resistance has yet to be attempted.