Analysis of fatigue crack propagation in nickel-plated components

This paper presents a procedure for the prediction of the fatigue life of thin-coated components. The procedure requires residual stress and hardness measurements in the surface layers of material of a coated component (coating and bulk) to develop numerical axisymmetric and three-dimensional finite element models capable of predicting the fatigue life. The application of the procedure to a thin-coated steel component (electroless nickel-plated) enabled confirmation of the proposed model. Besides this particular application, the method can be extended to the evaluation of the fatigue resistance of any other kind of thin-coated component.