Fatigue and Fracture Reliability Engineering




Preface

It has been reported that [1, 2] 80–90% of failures in load bearing structures are

related to fatigue and fracture. Therefore, fatigue reliability analyses now are

widely used to underpin design for safe operation of such artefacts. Fatigue

loading on engineering structures results in the onset of damage which, from time

to time, will require repair. This can be expensive if the structure/artefact has to be

taken out of service for the repair to be effected. Occasionally, if the damage is not

identified at an early stage, there is a likelihood of sudden, catastrophic failure.

Thus it is important to determine, as precisely as possible, the service life and

inspection periods in order to ensure safety. From practice, it is proved that

because of the random nature of external loading on structure and the internal

heterogeneity of the structural material and manufacturing variabilities, for the

same style of structure under the same load conditions, the full-lives display large

variations. Thus, it is difficult for a deterministic methodology to evaluate the

service life of the product sample and to include the randomness above mentioned.

Thus also there is a need for probabilistic approaches through a combination of

probabilistic statistics and mechanics.


Download
http://s18.alxa.net/s18/srvs2/02/001...ngineering.rar