Endurance of brittle solids under cyclic loads with local overheating

This article describes a method of calculating the endurance of brittle solids under cyclic loads with local over-heating of the material at the crack tips when no spontaneous heating of the material takes place during fracture. The method is applicable when the number of cycles to fracture is sufficiently large and when the loading frequency is relatively high so that other manifestations of the relaxation phenomena may be neglected. The method was used to carry out an approximate calculation of the endurance of polymethylmethacrylate under loading conditions corresponding to experimental data.