A Probabilistic Fatigue Damage Model for Describing the Entire Set of Fatigue Test Data of the Same Material

Abstract

Abstract One typical widely-accepted approach for describing the fatigue test data is the P-S-N curve approach. However, the P-S-N curve approach has some issues such as: (1) If there are only a few fatigue test data at a fatigue test stress level, the P-S-N curve approach is not valid due to the small sample size; (2) When the total number of fatigue tests under different stress levels might be larger such as more than 30 even though the number of fatigue tests at the same stress level is small, the P-S-N curve cannot be used to analyze such set of fatigue data; (3) It is difficult to calculate the reliability of a component under a cyclic stress level when the probabilistic distribution function under this stress level is not available in the P-S-N curves. The author has proposed the K-D probabilistic fatigue damage model (K-D model) to overcome those issues. The 6061-T6 10-gauge sheet-type flat fatigue specimen was designed, manufactured, and tested on the Instron 8081 fatigue test machine to verify this K-D model. The fatigue tests were under five different cyclic axial loadings with a total of 195 tests. In this paper, the fatigue test data will be analyzed by the P-S-N curve approach and the K-D model. The systematic comparisons between the P-S-N curve approach and the K-D model have approved and verified that the K-D model can be used to analyze and to describe the fatigue test data under all different fatigue stress levels and can be used to calculate the reliability of a component under any type of cyclic fatigue loading.