White Etching Crack Root Cause Investigations

White etching crack (WEC) failure is distinct to classical fatigue and driven by the composition of lubricants under special loading conditions; for example, slippage and electricity. The white etching area (WEA) within WEC contains carbon supersaturated ferrite (bcc-iron) and carbides, with a size of a few nanometers. This article presents investigations supporting the hypothesis that WEC processes start within a failure-free period by successive accumulation of a structural distortion. This can be measured by acoustic emission. Failure statistics show a steep ascent in the Weibull diagram (beta values beyond 1) leading to the assumption that WEC processes start unsuspicious, as one would see as a failure-free period, but imply a hidden subsurface accumulation of material defects. It is suggested and supported by the evidence presented within this article that WEC is neither related to the presence of nonmetallic inclusions nor related to other impurities in the steel. Instead, the failure is a sequence and accumulation of plastic deformations in the microstructure. Within the SAE 52100 material as discussed in this article, this accumulation is located in the microstructure around cementite, seen in a turn of hard magnetization toward soft magnetization proven by Barkhausen noise measurements. This decay is caused by the plastic deformation of such domains. Distortions in the vicinity of a cementite first would lead to carbon supersaturation by diffusion processes and later to a plastic deformation of the carbides. In the end, the complete distorted region will release the accumulated energy by downsizing the microstructure toward WEC.