The fatigue behavior of the polycrystalline nickel-based superalloy René 88 DT has been investigated at 593°C up to the very high cycle fatigue regime using ultrasonic fatigue techniques. Conventional damage tolerant methods failed to predict the fatigue life nor the large fatigue life viability of two orders of magnitude observed in the very high cycle regime. Fatigue crack initiation rather than fatigue crack growth is the life determining process in this alloy in the very high cycle regime.

At 593°C, all fatigue failures have subsurface origins. Most fatigue crack initiation sites consist of a large crystallographic facet or a cluster of several large crystallographic facets. By combining electron backscatter diffraction, metallographic serial sectioning and SEM-stereo-image-based quantitative fractographic analysis, critical microstructure features associated with subsurface crystallographic fatigue crack initiation were identified. Subsurface fatigue cracks formed by the localization of cyclic plastic deformation on {111} slip planes in the region close to and parallel to twin boundaries in favorably oriented large grains. The facet plane in the crack initiation grain is parallel to the slip plane with the highest resolved shear stresses. Analytical calculations show that twin boundary elastic incompatibility stresses contribute to the onset of cyclic plastic strain localization in the fatigue crack initiation grains. Favorably oriented neighbor grains also can assist with fatigue crack initiation and especially early small crack propagation. Environment may play an important role in the shift of fatigue crack initiation sites from surface to subsurface at elevated temperature.

The fatigue behavior of René 88 DT was also investigated under fully reversed loading at room temperature using ultrasonic fatigue techniques. Cyclic plastic strain localization and microcrack formation on specimen surfaces were quantitatively studied by EBSD. All microcracks examined in detail initiated near Σ3 twin boundaries, especially E3 twin boundaries which are parallel to slip planes with the highest Schmid factor within crack initiation grains.