A form of damage in bearing steels subjected to rolling contact fatigue is the formation of localised regions of white material just below the contact surface. These ‘white-etching regions’ are strikingly visible signs of damage during metallographic examination. One mechanism proposed to explain their formation is adiabatic shear localisation. Experiments are reported here using high-strain rate (250 s−1) tensile testing to show that this is not the case.
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