This paper deals with the effect of several residual stress profiles on the fatigue crack propagation in prestressing steel wires subjected to tension loading or bending moment. To this end, a computer program was developed to evaluate the crack front evolution on the basis of the Walker law. Results demonstrate that the absence of residual stresses makes the crack propagate towards a preferential crack path. When surface residual stresses are tensile and, correspondingly, core residual stresses are compressive, the fatigue crack fronts rapidly converge towards a quasi-straight shape. When surface residual stresses are compressive, with their corresponding tensile stresses in the core area, a preferential crack path also appears.

The aim of this paper is to calculate how the surface crack front and the dimensionless compliance evolve in cracked cylindrical bars subjected to cyclic tension or bending with different initial crack geometries (crack depths and aspect ratios). To this end, a computer application (in the Java programming language) that calculates the crack front’s geometric evolution and the dimensionless compliance was made by discretizing the crack front (characterized with elliptical shape) and assuming that every point advances perpendicularly to the crack front according to the Paris law, and using a three-parameter stress intensity factor (SIF). The results show that in fatigue crack propagation, relative crack depth influences more on dimensionless compliance than the aspect ratio, because the crack front tends to converge when the crack propagates from different initial geometries, showing greater values for tension than for bending. Furthermore, during fatigue crack growth, materials with higher values of the exponent of the Paris law produce slightly greater dimensionless compliance and a better convergence between the results for straight-fronted and circular initial cracks.