The influence of wet air on fatigue performance of 2024-T3 aluminum alloy

Fatigue life and staircase experiments with center-hole specimens in laboratory air and wet air environment were conducted to investigate the corrosion influence of wet air on fatigue performance in 2024-T3 aluminum alloy. The results show that wet air reduces both fatigue life and strength with the influence-factor of 0.6059 and 0.8722, respectively. Wet air environment enlarges the dispersivity of fatigue life, therefore using the corrosion-influence-factor obtained by eigenvalue or mean value to predict the fatigue life with high reliability will cause an unconservative conclusion. The corrosion-influence-factor of fatigue strength converted from that of fatigue life by standard S-N curve is almost the same with that gained by staircase experiments. It indicates that the existing standard S-N curve parameters are applicable in wet air environment.