RES EARCH

◥ that are introduced during material processing

RESEARCH ARTICLE or component fabrication, or if these flaws are
absent, from intrinsic features of the material
METALLURGY itself (1, 4, 5).

On the origins of fatigue strength in crystalline

Correlations between fatigue strength in the
high or very high cycle fatigue regimes and

metallic materials
the intrinsic mechanical properties of metallic
materials, including yield strength, ultimate
tensile strength, and hardness, have been widely
J. C. Stinville1,2*, M. A. Charpagne1,2, A. Cervellon2†, S. Hemery3, F. Wang2‡, reported in the literature (4, 6–9). Of most
P. G. Callahan2§, V. Valle3, T. M. Pollock2 interest is the observation that fatigue strength
increases with increasing yield strength or
Metallic materials experience irreversible deformation with increasing applied stress, manifested in ultimate tensile strength. However, plotting
localized slip events that result in fatigue failure upon repeated cycling. We discerned the physical normalized fatigue strength as a fraction of
origins of fatigue strength in a large set of face-centered cubic, hexagonal close-packed, and the yield strength or ultimate tensile strength
body-centered cubic metallic materials by considering cyclic deformation processes at nanometer resolution of the metal (the fatigue efficiency; Fig. 1) shows
over large volumes of individual materials at the earliest stages of cycling. We identified quantitative that metallic materials with high strengths in
relations between the yield strength and the ultimate tensile strength, fatigue strength, and physical many cases fail by fatigue at stresses as low
characteristics of early slip localization events. The fatigue strength of metallic alloys that deform by slip as 25% of their yield strength, indicating a
could be predicted by the amplitude of slip localization during the first cycle of loading. Our observations markedly low fatigue efficiency. The physical
provide a physical basis for well-known empirical fatigue laws and enable a rapid method of predicting fatigue processes and parameters at the microstructure
strength as reflected by measurement of slip localization amplitude. scale that link the tensile and yield strengths
to fatigue strength are not yet fully under-

C
stood. Moreover, it is unclear why metals and
yclic fatigue is the root cause of many enables more tests of a given material, which alloys with high tensile strength possess such
catastrophic failures in engineering sys- is essential for capturing the variability in a low fatigue efficiency. Substantial efforts
tems, with notable examples in air- fatigue behavior. Fatigue life variability may on fatigue modeling that fit constitutive mod-
craft, artificial heart valves, prosthetic be attributable to the presence of rare flaws els to large amounts of fatigue test data, or
devices, electronics packages, railways,
bridges, offshore platforms, and conventional
and nuclear power plants. The weakening of
the metallic materials caused by cyclic load-
ing ultimately results in fracture at stresses
that are often substantially lower than that
necessary to cause fracture under monotonic
loading (1). Such failures often occur after
millions or even billions of cycles, complicat-
ing the ability to predict when failure will
occur.
The design of safety-critical components for
survival beyond a critical number of cycles re-
quires knowledge of the fatigue strength of the
material for the required number of cycles. In
measurements of fatigue strength, samples
are typically cycled between a minimum and
maximum stress (smin, smax) to failure in a
servohydraulic testing machine at a frequency
near 1 Hz. At this frequency, ~278 hours are re-
quired to apply a million cycles or 278,000 hours
(~32 years) for a billion cycles. With the
development of ultrasonic fatigue testing ap-
proaches (2, 3), fatigue testing can be performed
at 20 kHz, allowing cycling to a billion cycles in
~14 hours. This accelerated approach to test-
ing enables rapid fatigue characterization of a
broader set of materials at very high cycles and

1
Fig. 1. Relationship between tensile properties and fatigue strength. sY and sU refer to yield and
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA.
2 ultimate tensile strengths, respectively. The fatigue strength, sl, is reported as a percentage of the yield
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA. 3Institut
PPRIME, Université de Poitiers, CNRS, ISAE-ENSMA, UPR strength (dots) and tensile strength (open circles). Fatigue tests were performed in the VHCF regime
3346, 86962 Chasseneuil Cedex, France. (frequency of 20 kHz, tension-compression cycling at room temperature to 109 cycles with R = smin/smax = −1.0)
*Corresponding author. Email: jcstinv@illinois.edu [steels (41-44), Ti alloys (45–47), superalloys (48–51), high-entropy alloy (fcc) CrMnFeCoNi (52), Cu, Ni, Ta,
†Present address: Safran Aircraft Engines, Chatellerault, France.
‡Present address: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. and Nb alloys (49, 53–55)]. The fatigue data are restricted to materials that deform by slip and contain a
§Present address: US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA. minimum content of extrinsic defects (e.g., inclusions or pores).

Stinville et al., Science 377, 1065–1071 (2022) 2 September 2022 1 of 7

RES EARCH | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E
Fig. 2. Quantitative measurement of the surface slip localization. (A) Left:
Conventional strain field obtained by HR-DIC measurement under a SEM. Right:
The discontinuity-tolerant Heaviside-DIC method provides quantitative
measurement of each single-slip event that develops at the surface of the
specimen during deformation. The displacement induced along the slip event is
reported in nanometers. (B) Surface slip localization induced by monotonic
loading at the surface of a nickel-based superalloy and pure niobium
polycrystalline materials. (C) Engineering stress-strain curves of some of the
Stinville et al., Science 377, 1065–1071 (2022) 2 September 2022
investigated polycrystalline metals for monotonic deformation at quasi-static
strain rate. (D) Average and 5% highest maximum slip intensity at 0.2% applied
macroscopic plastic strain as a function of the yield strength of the metal.
The maximum slip intensity for each single-slip event is normalized by the length
of the slip event to capture the effect of grain size. (E) Reversed loading to
investigate reversibility of slip. (F and G) Regions in a nickel-based superalloy
that display complete and partial reversibility during reversed loading. The
3D representation on the displacement field was obtained by HR-DIC.
2 of 7
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Fig. 3. Fatigue strength as a function of slip amplitude. Fatigue strength, sl, is determined for different
metallic materials by VHCF loading. The amplitude of the localization by slip is evaluated during monotonic
loading at 0.2% strain and compared to the fatigue strength for a ratio near zero (tension), or evaluated
after fully reversed loading and compared to the fatigue strength for a ratio of –1 (tension-compression). Points
are color-coded according to yield strength.
that make use of damage or fatigue indi-
cator parameters, have led to considerable
improvement of our predictive capabilities
(10–14). However, such models rely on param-
eters that are not universal to all metallic
materials.
Fatigue failure occurs by a complex series
of processes that include cyclic plastic defor-
mation, crack nucleation, and crack propaga-
tion to a critical size that results in fracture
(15, 16). The cyclic deformation process occurs
by glide of crystalline defects, so-called dislo-
cations, that develop into complex structures
such as persistent slip bands with ladder struc-
ture (5), deformation bands (17), or fatigue
shear bands (18). Fatigue crack nucleation is
thought to be a consequence of a phenomenon
known as cyclic irreversibility (5), in which
dislocations glide along slip planes as the
sample is loaded, but do not return to their
original positions during unloading or reversed
loading into compression. This results in a
heterogeneous accumulation of plastic strain
along with roughening of the sample surface,
which occurs when some of the defects exit the
surface of the crystal. In many instances, this
Stinville et al., Science 377, 1065–1071 (2022)
results in fatigue crack nucleation at the free
surface of a material. We hypothesize that a
more quantitative and statistical understand-
ing of the plastic localization processes that
occur in near-surface regions would improve
our ability to predict the fatigue strength of a
given material. Further, such understanding
could guide the development of fatigue-resistant
materials.
Quantification of plastic localization at the
microstructure scale—that is, at the scale of
individual crystals (grains) across a polycrys-
talline aggregate—is challenging for both
monotonic and cyclic loading. Experimental
observation of slip events requires nanometer-
scale spatial resolution. Conversely, capturing
the material response over statistically represent-
ative populations of microstructural configura-
tions requires millimeter-scale fields. However,
recent advances in testing devices that operate in
situ in the scanning electron microscope (SEM),
combined with high-resolution digital image
correlation and automated multimodal data
analysis, provide opportunities to quantify the
character of discrete slip events and slip activ-
ity over large fields of view (19–22).
2 September 2022
We integrated these experimental capabil-
ities to study slip localization during monotonic
and fully reversed loading on a large collection
of alloys with face-centered cubic (fcc), hexag-
onal close-packed (hcp), and body-centered cubic
(bcc) crystal structures. We performed measure-
ments over statistically significant regions of
interest, and we used multimodal data-merging
approaches to quantitatively study the relation-
ship between microstructure and individual
slip localization events, including their loca-
tion, intensity, and degree of reversibility. We
found that fatigue strength as a fraction of
yield strength is directly correlated with the
slip amplitude observed during the first cycle
of loading. This observation offers insights into
cyclic irreversibility, provides physical insights
into well-known fatigue laws, and suggests a
more efficient approach to designing fatigue-
resistant materials.
Quantitative and representative
measurements of slip localization
We studied a large collection of polycrystal-
line metals with varied crystallographic struc-
ture and processing paths (see table S1 and
supplementary materials). The engineering
stress–strain curves exhibited a large spec-
trum of yield strengths (Fig. 2C), ranging from
39 to 1183 MPa. We performed high-resolution
digital image correlation (HR-DIC) measure-
ments during monotonic and fully reversed
loading in the early plastic regime to investi-
gate the displacements associated with dis-
crete slip events that occur at the surface. We
performed measurements in the SEM that
provided displacement resolutions down to
10 nm and spatial resolution of a few tens of
nanometers. In Fig. 2, A and B, we show typical
HR-DIC maps for a reduced field of view for a
nickel-based alloy and pure niobium during
monotonic loading. Bands of highly localized
deformation develop from sequential slip of
groups of dislocations along crystallographic
planes. Combining HR-DIC measurements
with a discontinuity-tolerant Heaviside-DIC
method (23) enables a quantitative measure-
ment of the slip intensity along each indi-
vidual band during deformation over large
regions of each material (Fig. 2A, right). We
can track the evolution of the slip intensity
during monotonic and cyclic deformation,
and this evolution is highly dependent on the
material type and loading condition. When
reverse loading is involved (Fig. 2E), the evo-
lution of slip intensity is complex, with certain
regions displaying complete reversibility of
slip (Fig. 2F) while others display a certain
amount of irreversibility (Fig. 2G). This ir-
reversibility is indicative of the development
of extrusions (displacement above the initial
surface) or intrusions (displacement below the
initial surface) that may later serve as a crack
nucleation site.
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Fig. 4. Measurement of fatigue strength and amplitude of localization by
slip of metallic materials. (A) Fatigue curves for nickel-based superalloy
Inconel 718 strengthened by precipitation and by solid solution, tested in the
VHCF regime at a ratio of –1. Maximum stress is displayed in MPa (left) and as a
percentage of the yield strength (right). (B) Associated engineering stress-strain
curves of Inconel 718 strengthened by precipitation and by solid solution
under fully reversed loading. (C) Distribution of the highest slip intensity for Inconel
718 strengthened by precipitation after tensile part (black) and fully reversed
loading (red). Negative values are indicative of slip events that display an intrusion
character; positive values are associated with extrusion character. The horizontal
axis (count) for the distribution after compression was adjusted for better
comparison. (D) Same as (C) for Inconel 718 strengthened by solid solution.

We performed statistical analyses on the
experimental materials for >20,000 individ-
ual slip events. We identified each slip event
(see fig. S1 and supplementary materials) and
extracted its maximum intensity along its
surface trace. We normalized the maximum
intensity by the length of the slip event to
capture grain size effects. We obtained the
distributions of the normalized maximum
intensity and slip trace spacings for each
material and subsequently related these val-
ues to the microstructure of the material. In
Fig. 2D, we show the average and highest
5% of the distribution after an applied
plastic strain of 0.2% for all materials we
investigated as a function of yield strength.
Interestingly, the average and 5% highest
values of the distribution of the maximum
slip intensity and average of the slip trace
spacing (fig. S2B) display a linear dependence
on the yield strength across the large set of
materials examined. Materials with higher
yield strength, such as the precipitation-
strengthened superalloys, exhibit substan-
tially higher slip intensity during monotonic
loading. Surprisingly, both the fcc and hcp
materials show the same dependence. How-
ever, this linear relationship is distinctly
different for bcc materials, with less variation
in average slip intensity and slip trace spac-
ing with yield strength. Also, differences in
slip localization characteristics arise from
processing along different paths (i.e., 316L
processed along wrought and additive man-
ufacturing paths, and nickel alloy 718 in solid
solution– strengthened and precipitation-
strengthened forms).
Relationship between fatigue strength and
slip localization
We measured the fatigue strengths of several
of the materials using very high cycle fatigue
(VHCF) testing to 109 cycles. Fatigue tests were
performed at a fatigue stress ratio of either –1
(tension-compression) or near 0 (tension). The
fatigue efficiency (fatigue strength as a func-
tion of yield strength) is displayed for the
investigated materials as a function of the
maximum slip amplitude (highest 5%) after a
single cycle (tension or tension-compression)
to a maximum plastic strain of 0.2% (macro-
scopic yield) (Fig. 3). Remarkably, a linear de-
pendence of fatigue strength on slip amplitude
measured after the first cycle of fatigue is ap-
parent. Further, this relationship captures the
effect of the loading conditions (temperature
and stress ratio), grain size, crystal structure,
and yield strength and explicitly links the
monotonic properties to the cyclic fatigue strength,
through the physical characteristics of the slip
that occurs in the first cycle.
Polycrystalline metallic materials, as a con-
sequence of their processing paths, naturally
contain variations in many features of material
structure, including grain structure, chemical
distribution of solute, and strengthening pre-
cipitates if present. As a result, as the material
is loaded, plastic deformation does not occur
uniformly, but instead initially occurs by local-
ized slip in regions where dislocations first
overcome the obstacles to deformation. The
intensity of the slip displacements is highly
dependent on the intrinsic properties of the
material (crystal structure and microstructure)
and testing conditions (temperature, strain rate,
and loading). Dislocations can be pinned for
many reasons—lattice friction, the presence of
solute atoms, segregation, preexisting disloca-
tions within the material, obstacles such as
precipitates, low- and high-angle boundaries or
cell walls—and can escape when the resolved
shear stress on the slip plane is greater than the
strengths of the forces pinning them. This re-
sults in the collective motion of multiple dislo-
cations along individual planes, producing a
heterogeneous pattern of plasticity. Thus, slip
amplitudes in early cycling should vary with
the presence of solute and precipitates and
depend also on grain size (Fig. 2D). We clearly
illustrate this dependence on microstructure
in two variants of a model material, nickel-
based Inconel 718: precipitation-strengthened
with high yield strength, and solid solution–
strengthened with lower yield strength. Both
of these materials originated from the same
forged disk and initial heat treatment, re-
sulting in an identical chemistry and grain
structure in both variants. We obtained the
precipitation strengthening by an additional
aging treatment that does not affect the grain
structure. These two variants of material ex-
hibit different slip intensities, with the higher-
strength precipitate-containing material
subject to slip intensities that are a factor
of >2 higher than for the solid solution–
strengthened version. Another striking ex-
ample in the literature is slip in neutron
irradiated and nonirradiated zirconium al-
loys (24), where an increase of yield strength
by a factor of 2 due to neutron irradiation
results in a substantial increase in slip in-
tensity (25).

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RES EARCH | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E

variant displayed a substantially higher fa-

tigue efficiency, defined as the fatigue strength
as a percentage of the yield strength. We
evaluated the tendency of the two variants to
localize deformation by slip after monotonic
loading and unloading from a maximum ap-
plied plastic strain of 0.2% (Fig. 4B, black
curves) and after a fully reversed loading
(Fig. 4B, black plus red curves) to bring the
macroscopic plastic strain near zero after
compressive load. Some of the high-intensity
slip events did not recover their displace-
ments during the compressive part of the
cycle, indicating substantial plastic irrever-
sibility. In addition, slip events with intrusion
character formed during the compressive
loading part of the cycle, displayed as nega-
Fig. 5. Fatigue and localization for body-centered cubic metals. (A) The fatigue strength of various tive values in the distributions. More details
metals is reported as a percentage of the yield strength. Fatigue tests were performed at room can be found elsewhere (20) regarding quan-
temperature in the VHCF regime [steels (41–44); Ti alloys (45–47); superalloys (48–51); high-entropy titative measurements of irreversibility dur-
alloy (fcc) CrMnFeCoNi (52); Cu, Ni, Ta, and Nb alloys (49, 53–55)] and in the high cycle fatigue ing reverse loading at the scale of individual
regime [Mo, W, Ta, Nb, Fe, and Co alloys (39); HfNbTaTiZr alloy (40, 56); steels (57); aluminum slip bands by HR-DIC. Whereas the average
(16, 58); magnesium (59, 60)]. (B) Average and 5% highest maximum slip intensity for various macroscopic plastic strain is near zero, the slip
metals at 0.2% applied macroscopic plastic strain as a function of the yield strength of the metal. amplitude, defined as the absolute differ-
The maximum slip intensity for each single-slip event is normalized by the length of the slip event to ence between the average negative and posi-
capture the effect of grain size. tive values of the maximum slip intensity, is
substantial. We can explain the substantially
We found the collective dislocation glide and grain to grain. The variation in slip localiza- higher fatigue efficiency of the solid solution–
slip localization processes at room temperature tion intensity is especially pronounced in strengthened material with its lower resid-
in hcp/fcc structures to be substantially differ- some of the high-strength bcc alloys and the ual slip displacement (slip amplitude) relative
ent from those in bcc structures. In general, additively manufactured alloys. In the case to the precipitation-strengthened material
the higher number of available slip systems in of bcc alloys, the localization process is highly (Fig. 4, C and D).
the bcc crystal structure results in a less well dependent on crystallographic orientation. The intensity of the slip localization is
defined band structure relative to the fcc and High dispersion in slip intensity and slip band clearly predictive of the fatigue strength in the
hcp structures. As a consequence, slip is well spacing observed in the bcc high-entropy alloy large material set we investigated (Fig. 3).
dispersed in bcc alloys but more highly localized HfNbTaTiZr in comparison to other fcc ma- Monotonic properties such as yield strength,
in fcc and hcp alloys. In addition, plasticity in terials is an example (fig. S4). To a lesser de- tensile strength, or hardness have long been
bcc metals is usually controlled by screw gree, high dispersion is also observed in the known to be related to cyclic fatigue strength
dislocation motion, resulting in some ambigu- additively manufactured materials, which can (4, 6–9). Our data make clear that slip loca-
ity as to the nature of the slip planes (26), be- be attributed to heterogeneity in the fine-scale lization is the physical origin of this observa-
cause screw dislocations easily cross-slip and printed structure (low-angle boundaries and tion. This relationship may come as a surprise,
glide on multiple planes. In the dislocation cell structure). considering that fatigue life is controlled by
dynamics simulations of Cui et al. (27), screw The location of the highest slip amplitude cyclic processes that involve complex plastic
dislocations were found to contribute to fre- events during monotonic and reverse loading deformation structures (5, 17, 18, 33, 34) and
quent cross-slip and jog multiplication, inducing correlates well with the location of the crack fatigue life is governed by a combination of
more spatially homogeneous plastic deforma- nucleation site in the high cycle fatigue and crack nucleation, early propagation, and crack
tion with less pronounced slip localization in VHCF regimes (table S2), indicating again the growth. For tests we performed in the high
bcc metals. close relation between slip localization and crack cycle fatigue regime (>106 cycles) and espe-
Our measurement of slip events over large nucleation. Because fatigue often involves load- cially in the VHCF regime (~109 cycles) that we
fields of view (encompassing many thousands ing in tension to a specific stress level and then used to determine fatigue strength, the cyclic
of grains) provides statistical information and reverse loading into compression to the same peak stress is usually lower than the mono-
also reveals the effect of the microstructure magnitude of stress (R ratio = –1), the factors tonic yield strength; consequently, most of the
on slip localization. The development of data- that influence the reverse motion of disloca- lifetime is consumed by plastic localization
merging tools (19, 21) allows for direct corre- tions as the load goes into compression are im- and the initiation of a critically sized fatigue
lation of slip events with specific features of portant to the evolution of slip amplitude. In crack (15, 16). In addition, the nucleation of
microstructure. For example, particular grain Fig. 4B, we show how this behavior varies cracks is directly related to the amplitude of
configurations that develop during process- with stress-strain behavior for the two model the extrusion/intrusion phenomenon that orig-
ing of metallic materials (“special” bounda- variants of the nickel-based Inconel 718 alloy. inates from slip localization (35) or to dis-
ries or “annealing twins”) have been known The first variant (red curve) is the precipitation- location pile-ups at grain boundaries that
to promote intense slip localization parallel strengthened version; the second variant is the result from intense slip. Moreover, it has been
to them (fig. S3) during deformation of steels solid solution–strengthened material (blue). De- previously observed that the dislocation struc-
(28), nickel-based superalloys (18, 29, 30), and spite the large difference in their yield strength, tures that form during cyclic loading are de-
titanium alloys (31, 32). Intragranular slip we observed similar fatigue strengths for the pendent on the propensity of the material to
localization may also vary substantially from two variants. The solid solution–strengthened easily cross-slip or develop highly planar slip.

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Labyrinths, cells, deformation band walls, per-
sistent slip band ladders, dipole arrays, and
stacking fault bands are dislocation patterns
that develop during fatigue; the types of dis-
location patterns that form are highly de-
pendent on the slip character (36, 37). These
phenomena are evidently all reflected in the
tendency of the material to localize the plastic
deformation.
Finally, our experiments yield the observa-
tion that fatigue strength as a fraction of yield
strength (at 109 cycles) can be predicted by the
slip amplitude after the first cycle of loading.
From the data plotted in Fig. 3, we found the
following relation:
sl
¼ 1  ld ð1Þ
sY
where sl is fatigue strength at 109 cycles, sY
is yield strength, l is the localization pa-
rameter [which depends only on crystal
structure (fcc/hcp or bcc)], and d is the slip
amplitude in a single cycle that is represen-
tative of the loading ratio (after tensile load-
ing for R = 0 and after fully reversed loading
for R = –1). This expression describes the
behavior of a wide range of fcc and hcp ma-
terials, with the possible exception of mate-
rials with very low yield strength (such as
Cu) where the barriers to dislocation glide
are very low. Only for high-purity metals is the
value of d very low, and as a consequence
the fatigue strength approaches or is above
the yield strength of the material. The precise
normalized fatigue strength where this rela-
tionship breaks down is an interesting sub-
ject for future investigation.
The expression in Eq. 1 is applicable to
fatigue strengths that are in the high cycle
fatigue or VHCF regimes, where fatigue data
are represented by the well-known empirical
Basquin law:
sa ¼ sf ′ðNf Þc
where sa is the stress amplitude, sf′ is the fatigue
strength coefficient, Nf is the number of cycles
to failure, and c is the fatigue life coefficient.
The stress amplitude sa can be expressed as
smax ð1  RÞ
sa ¼
2
where R is the stress ratio and smax is the
maximum applied stress. Considering the pre-
vious equations and the fatigue strength at
109 cycles, the fatigue strength coefficient for
all investigated materials that deform by slip
is expressed as
1R
sf ′ ¼ c sY ð1  ldÞ
2ð109 Þ
Our analysis provides insights on the physi-
cal origins of the fatigue strength coefficient
sf′, which has generally been treated as a fit
parameter. Increasing the yield strength of a
material might be expected to increase its
fatigue strength by increasing the fatigue
strength coefficient. However, with the ten-
dency for higher-strength materials to localize
more intensely, this potential benefit is offset,
as demonstrated by the ld term in Eq. 4. As
such, we link the low fatigue efficiency of the
strongest materials directly to the localization
process.
Another important consideration revealed
by HR-DIC measurements during fatigue
loading (20) is that the highest-amplitude
slip events that develop in tension also have
a tendency to have the highest level of ir-
reversibility during the compressive part of
the cycle (negative R ratio). Although many
high-intensity slip events do not reverse com-
pletely during compressive loading (Fig. 4),
the resulting effect is that new slip events with
intrusion character develop during the com-
pressive phase, giving rise to local combined
intrusion-extrusion events that are captured
by the slip amplitude d. The degree of irrever-
sibility can be different from one material to
another.
Slip localization for fatigue strength prediction
The investigation of the slip activity and am-
plitude of localization during monotonic and
reversed loading provides an opportunity to
rapidly evaluate the fatigue strength and
fatigue efficiency of materials and their dif-
ferent microstructural variants that develop
along different processing paths. This ap-
proach not only provides new insights into
the role of crystal structure and microstruc-
ture in determining fatigue strength, it also
provides guidance for alloy and microstruc-
ture design. Alloy deformation is often char-
acterized in terms of slip character (37), with
slip bands described qualitatively as wavy,
ð2Þ planar, coarse, or fine. However, the further
quantitative assessment of slip amplitude
provides unique information linking the crys-
tal structure and microstructure to mechan-
ical properties. The propensity of high-strength
fcc/hcp materials to produce high slip am-
plitudes results in a low fatigue efficiency.
ð3Þ Thus, monotonic strength and cyclic fatigue
strength must be balanced in recognition of
the specific engineering application of a ma-
terial and with consideration of which of these
properties is life-limiting. Beyond this, the
statistical measurements of the slip character
in relation to the microstructure point to dif-
ferent pathways for the design of alloys and
processing paths that control microstructure
in order to minimize the localization of the
ð4Þ
plasticity, and as a consequence increase the
fatigue strength.
The high–yield strength, high-entropy alloy
HfNbTaTiZr displays unusual behavior among
all the bcc alloys (Fig. 5). The fatigue ratio is
known to usually be substantially higher for
bcc metals relative to fcc or hcp metals. The
fatigue strengths of bcc metals usually ap-
proach their yield strengths, even for relatively
high–yield strength materials. As an exam-
ple, bcc steels and eutectoid steels are known
to display high fatigue strength (38) in ad-
dition to their high yield or tensile strength.
The fatigue properties we report for a list of
bcc alloys and metals (39, 40) (Fig. 5A) overlap
with literature results (Fig. 1). We investigated
some of the reported bcc alloys such as pure
Nb, pure tantalum, C-103, and HfNbTaTiZr
using HR-DIC; their propensities to localize
the deformation are shown in Fig. 5B. Our
data indicate that in comparison to fcc and
hcp metals, bcc metals tend to distribute strain
in a more spatially homogeneous fashion.
Relatively low average slip intensities de-
velop during monotonic loading of the pure
Nb, pure tantalum, and C-103 alloys. As a con-
sequence, they display very high fatigue ef-
ficiency, in some cases demonstrating fatigue
strengths higher than their yield strengths.
The particular example of HfNbTaTiZr is an
interesting exception because it displays the
highest intensities of slip localization, with levels
similar to fcc and hcp materials. The most
intense slip traces in this alloy are associated
with particular crystallographic orientations
that inhibit cross-slip. This observation is
further highlighted by the high dispersion in
slip intensities and slip band spacing observed
in the bcc HfNbTaTiZr in comparison to other
bcc and fcc materials (fig. S4). These results
suggest that control of the crystallographic
texture in this class of alloys may be critical for
achieving exceptional properties. A deeper phys-
ical understanding of the dislocation mecha-
nisms that result in intense localization in
high–yield strength bcc alloys may also provide
guidance for the design of alloys within this
class of materials.
We observed a linear relationship between
the amplitude of slip localization that develops
during the first cycle and the fatigue strength
of the material. We have directly quantified
this interrelationship among slip amplitude,
irreversibility, and fatigue life for materials
that deform by slip. Our observations suggest
that the plastic localization that occurs dur-
ing the first cycle naturally reflects the propen-
sity of the material for cyclic irreversibility. Our
analyses also capture global differences in the
behavior of fcc and hcp materials compared
to bcc and the tendency for more homogeneous
deformation in the bcc alloys. The slip analysis
is also very useful for identification of alloys
that exhibit exceptional/unusual behavior, as
exhibited by the bcc multi–principal element
alloy HfNbTaTiZr, and provides a different
approach for focusing the search for fatigue-
resistant alloys.

Stinville et al., Science 377, 1065–1071 (2022) 2 September 2022 6 of 7

RES EARCH | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E

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