A series of fretting fatigue experiments are described in which the fatigue life is found to vary
with contact size. There exists a critical contact size, where fatigue lives are longer than 107
cycles. Short crack methodologies based on the Kitagawa–Takahashi diagram are
developed and used to predict the critical contact size in the experiments. Good agreement
is found between experimental and predicted results. A discussion regarding the
appropriate fundamental material parameters for cases where the stress field is non-uniform …