The plastic deformation ahead of crack tip is of great significance to analysis of the fatigue crack growth behaviour. Using the in-situ microscopy experiment technique, the variation of strain field in the vicinity of crack tip is investigated within load cycles at the small time scale. The contours of plastic zones are measured through the in-situ observation and digital image correlation (DIC). Finite element method (FEM) is also used to simulate the plasticity ahead of the crack tip. Furthermore, the numerical studies are extended to the single overload case to analyse the effect of large plastic zone on the subsequent crack growth. The evolution of residual stress is extracted by FEM simulation to explore the influence of plastic deformation before, during and after the single overload applied on the following crack propagation. Based on the FEM analysis, a model is proposed to approximate the size of the overload effect zone. Finally, some experimental data and numerical simulations are employed to validate this model.
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