Paris' law

characterises the load around a crack tip and the rate of crack growth is experimentally shown to be a function of the range of stress intensity

is the fatigue crack growth for a load cycle

are obtained experimentally and also depend on environment, frequency, temperature and stress ratio.

[2] The stress intensity factor range has been found to correlate the rate of crack growth from a variety of different conditions and is the difference between the maximum and minimum stress intensity factors in a load cycle and is defined as Being a power law relationship between the crack growth rate during cyclic loading and the range of the stress intensity factor, the Paris–Erdogan equation can be visualized as a straight line on a log-log plot, where the x-axis is denoted by the range of the stress intensity factor and the y-axis is denoted by the crack growth rate.

The ability of ΔK to correlate crack growth rate data depends to a large extent on the fact that alternating stresses causing crack growth are small compared to the yield strength.

Therefore crack tip plastic zones are small compared to crack length even in very ductile materials like stainless steels.

Single cycles can be readily counted for constant-amplitude loading.

Additional cycle identification techniques such as rainflow-counting algorithm need to be used to extract the equivalent constant-amplitude cycles from a variable-amplitude loading sequence.

In a 1961 paper, P. C. Paris introduced the idea that the rate of crack growth may depend on the stress intensity factor.

[4] Then in their 1963 paper, Paris and Erdogan indirectly suggested the equation with the aside remark "The authors are hesitant but cannot resist the temptation to draw the straight line slope 1/4 through the data" after reviewing data on a log-log plot of crack growth versus stress intensity range.

[5] The Paris equation was then presented with the fixed exponent of 4.

which is defined as or ratio of minimum to maximum stress intensity factors.

The Paris–Erdogan equation holds over the mid-range of growth rate regime, but does not apply for very low values of

, or for very high values approaching the material's fracture toughness,

The alternating stress intensity at the critical limit is given by

[6] The slope of the crack growth rate curve on log-log scale denotes the value of the exponent

, although for materials with low static fracture toughness such as high-strength steels, the value of

is yield stress), the approximation of small-scale yielding applies, enabling the use of linear elastic fracture mechanics and the stress intensity factor.

Thus, the Paris–Erdogan equation is only valid in the linear elastic fracture regime, under tensile loading and for long cracks.