Fatigue cracking in high-strength cold-drawn pearlitic steel wires for anchorage in rocks

AbstractThis paper analyzes the fatigue crack path in two pearlitic steels with very different microstructural arrangement: a hot rolled pearlitic steel bar and a commercial high-strength cold drawn prestressing steel wire frequently used for anchorage in rocks. In both materials, fatigue cracks are mostly transcollonial and tend to fracture pearlitic lamellae, so that many different micro-phenomena appear such as non-uniform crack opening displacement, micro-discontinuities, branchings, bifurcations and frequent local deflections, all of them creating a sort of microstructural roughness with regard to the fatigue crack path which is different in hot rolled bar and in the cold drawn wire