How and why the fatigue S–N curve does not approach a horizontal asymptote

Abstract As mentioned by Japanese researchers, during the 1980s, steels can fail after 10 7 cycles, since the gigacycle fatigue failure in many alloys was experimentally proved up to 10 10 cycles by C. Bathias and co-workers very recently (1990s) (ICM6, 4 (1991) 463; Fat. Fract. Eng. Mat. Struct., 22 (1999) 559). A sum up of this work is given in this paper, with many results and a discussion of mechanisms.