Abstract: The progressive fatigue damage of a material is closely related to the whole populationof cracks on the surface of an un-notched specimen.In order to understand whichparameter is a more useful indicator of fatigue damage,rotatory bending fatigue testswere carried out using smooth specimens of medium-carbon steel.The behavior ofshort crack propagation during fatigue was examined and a new parameter "totalcrack area" was suggested.The aim of this paper is to extend the research on fatiguedamage in the already studied steel and to study how these damage parameters arecorrelated with the process of fatigue damage in order to evaluate the effectiveness ofdamage detection methods.

Key words: fatigue damage, fatigue crack density, total crack length, totalcrack area