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Design of step‐stress accelerated life tests for estimating the fatigue reliability of structural components based on a finite‐element approach
Author(s) -
Klemenc Jernej,
Nagode Marko
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
fatigue and fracture of engineering materials and structures
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.887
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1460-2695
pISSN - 8756-758X
DOI - 10.1111/ffe.13452
Subject(s) - structural engineering , reliability (semiconductor) , finite element method , component (thermodynamics) , fatigue testing , stress (linguistics) , vibration fatigue , acceleration , materials science , engineering , power (physics) , linguistics , physics , philosophy , classical mechanics , quantum mechanics , thermodynamics
This article describes how a step‐stress accelerated life test (SSALT) can be designed for testing the fatigue life and reliability of structural components with a dominant failure mode. With simple numerical simulations of the crack's propagation in the notched area of the structural part for different loading levels, the slope of the S–N curve for a structural component is initially estimated. Then, a very few fatigue–life experiments are carried out in the high‐cycle domain to determine the intercept of the structure's S–N curve. By considering the scatter from the material's P–S–N curve, different SSALT designs for the structural component can be composed and checked for their expected acceleration factor. The procedure is experimentally validated for the case of a notched specimen and two different SSALT designs. From the results it can be concluded that the predicted durations of the SSALT experiments correlate well with the real experiments.