Fatigue failure of disordered materials

We present an experimental and theoretical study of the fatigue failure of heterogeneous materials under cyclic compression considering asphalt as a specific example. Varying the load amplitude, experiments reveal a finite fatigue limit below which the specimen does not break, while approaching the tensile strength of the material a rapid failure occurs. In the intermediate load range, the lifetime decreases with the load as a power law. We introduce two novel theoretical approaches, namely, a fibre bundle model and a fuse model, and show that both capture the major microscopic mechanisms of the fatigue failure of heterogeneous materials, providing an excellent agreement with the experimental findings.