Complete 5 pages APA formatted article: Materials Fatigue Failure. Materials such as ceramics (e.g., carbide, silicon, and porcelain), metals (zinc, aluminum, copper, iron, etc.). or polymers (milk jugs and other household utensils) are carefully tested by engineers and scientists through materials quality testing. Quality testing reveals certain materials’ mechanical properties, such as the ultimate tensile stress, yield stress, etc. The ultimate tensile strength of a material is a measure of material strength. During use, the material may degrade, causing it to fail at lower than its actual ultimate tensile stress. For instance, if the material is repeatedly loaded, the material will undergo a failure known as fatigue. Fatigue failure normally occurs at much lower stresses than the material’s ultimate strength.

Fatigues are common types of failures for materials and have been studied for decades. Fatigue failure occurs daily in the objects that we are familiar with. For instance, in airplanes, the wings undergo fatigue several cycles per flight. Bridges undergo fatigue each time a vehicle or people pass over them. However, the fact that material undergoes fatigue does not necessarily mean it will fail or break. Scientists and engineers conduct careful laboratory experiments to ensure that materials don’t fail when they are subjected to fatigue. They do so by designing with values way above the actual fatigue failure of the material.

Fatigue properties of the various materials differ from one material to the other. The fatigue property of a material depends on the material’s source, quality, duration, and type of stress. Given that paper clips are not high-quality materials, they are normally made from very cheap steels that have low tensile strengths and in cases where quality variability does not matter. This laboratory work that was conducted in groups of six people represents the measurements and evaluations of the paper clip hardness were measured with the use of hardness machine. A protractor was used to measure the maximum angle at which the paper clip fails. The main aim of this laboratory report is to illustrate how the different sizes of magnetic paper clips behave under different cyclic loads. Also, the report gives an in-depth analysis of the results based on the paper clip’s hardness.