Effect of impact-corrosion coupling damage on fatigue properties of 2198-T8 aluminum-lithium alloy

•The pitting distribution matches the trend of the residual stress distribution.•The coupled fatigue life tends to increase and then decrease with increasing impact energy.•The coupled effects of impact and corrosion are more pronounced at lower impact energies.•The effect of coupled corrosion time on fatigue life is the same as corrosion alone. The peeling of aircraft surface paint due to foreign object impact can expose the aluminum–lithium alloy substrate to atmospheric corrosion, resulting in the fatigue performance being affected by the combined effect of impact damage and corrosion damage. In this work, the effects of impact damage and corrosion damage on the fatigue life of 2198-T8 aluminum–lithium alloy sheet were investigated. The strain field distribution of specimens with coupled impact and corrosion damage under cyclic loading was analyzed by Digital Image Correlation (DIC) technique, and the coupling relationship between impact and corrosion damage was analyzed based on the crack propagation path and fracture morphology. The results show that surface corrosion pits depth distribution of impact dents follows the same trend as residual stress distribution. For the coupling damage of the hemispherical punch, the coupled effect between impact damage and corrosion damage is most evident at low impact energy. At higher impact energies, the impact damage dominates the coupling damage. As the salt spray corrosion time increases, the fatigue life decrease rate gradually slows with increasing impact energy, and the impact damage has a greater effect on the fatigue life in the early corrosion stage. Compared to the salt spray corrosion environment at 35 °C, the fatigue life of the specimen at 25 °C increased by a maximum of 50.48 % as the impact energy increased from 10 J to 25 J.