Fatigue crack propagation in near-threshold regime was studied in the 304L austenitic stainless steel in two microstructural states: as-received (AR) with finer microstructure and low susceptibility to the transformation-induced plasticity (TRIP) effect, and solution-annealed (SA) with coarser microstructure and higher susceptibility to TRIP. At the load ratio R = 0.1 the threshold was higher in the SA state than in the AR state due to coarser grains and possibly the TRIP effect. In order to clarify the role of crack closure, experiments at R = 0.7 were done. The threshold in the SA state was still higher by 1 MPa·m0.5. This effect was identified as crack tip shielding induced by phase transformation, an example of a non-closure shielding effect. Higher resistance to crack growth in the SA state was attributed to promoted martensitic transformation in non-favorable oriented grain families rather than thicker martensite layers in the crack path area. The conclusions were verified by experiments at R = 0.7 and temperature 150 °C > Ms which did not reveal any notable difference in thresholds. However, the threshold values were affected by the load-shedding gradient C = -dΔK/da, which had to be equalized in both experimental setups inside and outside the furnace.
Keywords: 304L steel; crack closure; effective threshold; fatigue crack propagation; load shedding; martensitic transformation; solution annealing.