Vacuum retarding and air accelerating effect on the high-cycle and very-high-cycle fatigue behavior of a ZK60 magnesium alloy

It is suspected early that the ultra-slow crack propagation in fine-granular-area (FGA) may be sensitive to the internal vacuum-like environment. In other words, fatigue failure in the very-high-cycle regime may be related to the internal vacuum-like environment. Since magnesium alloy is more susceptible to the environmental effect, it is selected as the research carrier in this study. A magnesium alloy is investigated in ambient air and vacuum environments comparatively, and the vacuum loading environment offers a valuable reference to investigate the possible environmental effect. The results show that plastic deformation mechanism in different loading environments keeps the same at crack initiation site. However, the different loading environments not only change the fatigue life, but also the failure mode. At higher stress levels, surface failure dominates in air loading environment, whereas internal failure dominates in vacuum loading environment and presents longer fatigue life. It is considered that failure mode in vacuum loading environment is mainly affected by the critical grains, whereas that in air loading environment is mainly affected by the competition between the surface air acceleration effect and the critical grains. Fatigue life is mainly affected by the internal vacuum retarding effect and the surface air accelerating effect.