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Metal fatigue in a teaspoon
Metal fatigue is caused by repeated cycles of stress - pushing your teaspoon first one way and then the other. Small cracks spread through the metal crystal lattice, widen out, and eventually make the whole material snap.
Inspect fatigued metal in closeup and you could be looking at a chunk of raw mineral dug straight from the ground. And yet, look closely at the fracture, and you can see that the surface is relatively smooth, suggesting planes of atoms have literally cleaved apart.
Our images are published under a Creative Commons Licence (see opposite) and are free for noncommercial use. We also license our images for commercial use. Please contact us directly via our website for more details.
Metal fatigue in a teaspoon
Metal fatigue is caused by repeated cycles of stress - pushing your teaspoon first one way and then the other. Small cracks spread through the metal crystal lattice, widen out, and eventually make the whole material snap.
Inspect fatigued metal in closeup and you could be looking at a chunk of raw mineral dug straight from the ground. And yet, look closely at the fracture, and you can see that the surface is relatively smooth, suggesting planes of atoms have literally cleaved apart.
Our images are published under a Creative Commons Licence (see opposite) and are free for noncommercial use. We also license our images for commercial use. Please contact us directly via our website for more details.