In general, fretting is a contact damage process due to micro-slip associated with small amplitude oscillatory movement between two surfaces in contact. Previous studies in fretting fatigue have observed a contact size effect related to contact width. The volume-averaging method of theoretically predicted contact stress fields was required to emulate experimental trends and to predict the observed contact size effects. This contact size effect is captured by the mean values of stresses and strains at the element integration points of FE model and two critical plane models (SWT, FS) in the present paper. It is shown that crack nucleation and fretting fatigue life can be predicted by the FE-based critical plane models.
