How and why the fatigue S–N curve does not approach a horizontal asymptote

As mentioned by Japanese researchers, during the 1980s, steels can fail after 107 cycles, since the gigacycle fatigue failure in many alloys was experimentally proved up to 1010 cycles by C. Bathias and co-workers very recently (1990s) (ICM6, 4 (1991) 463; Fat. Fract. Eng. Mat. Struct., 22 (1999) 559). A sum up of this work is given in this paper, with many results and a discussion of mechanisms.