Fatigue Damage

Book excerpt: About the Series: This important new series of five volumes has been written with both the professional engineers and the academic in mind. Christian Lalanne explores every aspect of vibration and shock, two fundamental and crucially important areas of mechanical engineering, from both the theoretical and practical standpoints. As all products need to be designed to withstand the environmental conditions to which they are likely to be subjected, prototypes must be verified by calculation and laboratory tests, the latter according to specifications from national or international standards. The concept of tailoring the product to its environment has gradually developed whereby, from the very start of a design project, through the to the standards specifications and testing procedures on th e prototype, the real environment in which the product being tested will be functioning is taken into account. The five volumes of Mechanical Shock and Vibration cover all the issues that need to be addressed in this area of mechanical engineering. The theoretical analyses are placed in the context of the real world and of laboratory tests - essential for the development of specifications. Volume IV: Fatigue Damage Fatigue damage in a system with one degree of freedom is one of the two criteria applied when comparing the severity of vibratory environments. The same criterion is also employed for a specifciation representing the effects produced by the set of vibrations imposed in a real environment. In this volume, which is devoted to the calculation of fatigue damage, the author explores the hypotheses adopted to describe the behavior of material suffering fatigue and the laws of fatigue accumulation. He also considers the methods of counting the response peaks, which are used to establish the histogram when it is impossible to use the probability density of the peaks obtained with a Gaussian signal. The expressions for mean damage and its standard deviation are established and other hypotheses are tested.