Fatigue Consideration In

Design Of Structures
by,
Ambetkar Krunal D.
(M. E. Structure-I)
• Presentation Outline
Introduction
Objectives And Scope
What Is Fatigue?
Fatigue Failure
Fatigue Life Assessment
1) Stress-life Diagram (S-N Diagram) Approach
-Typical S-N curve
2) Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics Approach
-Fatigue Failure Stages
Conclusions
References
 INTRODUCTION
Initially most items designed by early engineers did not
consider time based failure modes such as fatigue, creep,
corrosion and wear. Nor did they include considerations
of fatigue.
Early designs mainly considered strength and stiffness with
use of ‘‘safety factors
There was no obvious defect in workmanship or material,
and the only feature common to these failures was the
fact that the stressed imposed were not steady in
magnitude, but varied in a cyclical manner.
This phenomenon of failure of a material when subjected to
a number of varying stress cycles became known as
fatigue since Fatigue is a localized damage process of a
component produced by cyclic loading.
This plastic deformation induces permanent damage to the
component and crack develops. As the component
experiences in increasing number of loading cycles, the
length of the crack increases.
After a certain number of cycles, the crack will cause the
component to fail. The part fails at a stress level below
that at which would occur under static loading. This
phenomenon is known as fatigue failure, and it is
responsible for the majority of failures.
For offshore structures, fatigue damage is one of the main
types of damage.
Then maximum stress to which the material can be
subjected without fatigue failure, regardless the number
of cycles, is known as the endurance limit or fatigue limit.
 OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE
1) The design aspects related to fatigue failure, an important
mode of failure in engineering structures.
2) Fatigue failure results mainly due to variable loading or more
precisely due to cyclic variations in the applied loading or
induced stresses.
3) More research is needed to study and compare the fatigue
effect on different strengthening systems.
4) The future studies need to take into account the effect of
repeated loading on the energy dissipation mechanism.
5) Thus, more experimental and analytical research is needed to
examine this assumption and to develop comprehensive analytical
fatigue prediction models.
6) More research is needed to examine the effect of fatigue
loading on the ductility of RC beams strengthened using various
 WHAT IS FATIGUE?
•Fatigue is a phenomenon associated with variable
loading or more precisely to cyclic stressing or
straining of a material.
•Just as we human beings get fatigue when a specific
task is repeatedly performed, in a similar manner
structural components subjected to variable loading
get fatigue, which leads to their premature failure
under specific conditions.
What is fatigue loading?
•Fatigueloading is primarily the type of loading which
causes cyclic variations in the applied stress or strain
on a component.
•Thus any variable loading is basically a fatigue loading.
Here are some examples of things
that are subjected to cyclic stress:
 Railway lines that bend every time a wheel
passes over it.
 Gear teeth.
 Springs.
 The suspension cable on suspension bridge
every time a vehicle passes over it.
 The skin structural members of an aero plane
every time it flies.
 A shaft with a pulley belt drive.
 The connecting rod in a reciprocating engine.
 The stub axle on a vehicle wheel.
 FATIGUE FAILURE
•Often structures subjected to such repeated or cyclic
stressing are found to have failed even when the actual
maximum stresses were below the ultimate strength of
the material, and quite even below the yield strength.
•When the failure had occurred only after the stresses
have been repeated a very large number of times.
Hence the failure is called fatigue failure.
•This may develop at the points of discontinuity, an
existing subsurface crack or surface faults.
•Once a crack is developed it propagates with the
increase in stress cycle finally leading to failure of the
component by fracture.
There are mainly two characteristics of this kind of
failures:
(a) Progressive development of crack.
(b) Sudden fracture without any warning since yielding
is practically absent.
Fatigue failures are influenced by
•Nature and magnitude of the stress cycle.
•Endurance limit.
• Stress concentration.
• Surface characteristics.
These factors are therefore interdependent. For
example, by grinding and polishing, case hardening or
coating a surface, the endurance limit may be
improved. For machined steel endurance limit is
approximately half the ultimate tensile stress.
 FATIGUE LIFE ASSESMENT
•Machine elements subjected to fluctuating stresses
usually fail at stress levels much below their ultimate
strength and in many cases below the yield point of
the material too.
•These failures occur due to very large number of
stress cycle and are known as fatigue failure.
These failures usually begin with a small crack.
•There are two types of basic approaches used in
fatigue life assessment:
1) Stress-Life Diagram (S-N Diagram) approach
2) Linear elastic fracture mechanics approach
 1) Stress-life Diagram
(S-N Diagram) Approach
The basis of the Stress-Life method is the Wohler S-N
diagram, shown schematically for two materials in Figure.
The S-N diagram plots nominal stress amplitude S versus
cycles to failure N.
Endurance Limit:
•Certain materials have a fatigue limit or endurance limit which
represents a stress level below which the material does not fail
and can be cycled infinitely.
•It’s constant stress level on S-N curve for an infinite life.
• If the applied stress level is below the endurance limit of the
material, the structure is said to have an infinite life.
•Endurance limit is defined as the alternating stress that causes
failures after some specified number of cycles.
Typical S-N curve
 A typical plot of reversed stress (S) against number of
cycles to fail (N) is shown in above figure. The zone below 103
cycles is considered as low cycle fatigue, zone between 103
and 106 cycles is high cycle fatigue with finite life and beyond
106 cycles, the zone is considered to be high cycle fatigue with
infinite life.
 2) Linear Elastic Fracture
Mechanics Approach
•A fatigue failure begins with a small crack; the initial
crack may be so minute and cannot be detected.
•The crack usually develops at a point of localized
stress concentration like discontinuity in the material,
such as a change in cross section, a keyway or a hole.
•Once a crack is initiated, the stress concentration
effect become greater and the crack propagates.
•Consequently the stressed area decreases in size, the
stress increase in magnitude and the crack propagates
more rapidly.
•Thus fatigue loading results in sudden, unwarned
failure.
 Fatigue Failure Stages:
Fatigue cracks almost always initiate at free surfaces,
usually external surfaces but also internal surfaces if the
metal contains defects such as voids and cracked second-
phase particles. Common external surface defects include
geometric notches and surface roughness.
Fatigue crack nucleation and growth occurs in the following
stages:
Thus three stages are involved in fatigue failure namely
-Crack initiation
-Crack propagation
-Fracture
Typical propagation of a fatigue crack.
 Crack initiation:
•Areas of localized stress concentrations such as fillets,
notches, key ways, bolt holes and even scratches or tool
marks are potential zones for crack initiation.
• Crack also generally originate from a geometrical
discontinuity
• During plastic straining slip occurs and (dislocation
movements) results in gliding of planes one over the
other.
•During the cyclic stressing, slip saturation results which
make further plastic deformation difficult.
•As a consequence, intrusion and extrusion occurs
creating a notch like discontinuity in the material.
 Crack propagation:
•This further increases the stress levels and the
process continues, propagating the cracks across the
grains or along the grain boundaries, slowly
increasing the crack size.
• As the size of the crack increases the cross
sectional area resisting the applied stress decreases
and reaches a thresh hold level at which it is
insufficient to resist the applied stress.
 Final fracture:
• As the area becomes too insufficient to resist the
induced stresses any further a sudden fracture results
in the structures.
 CONCLUSIONS
 It is observed that the fracture mechanics based fatigue
life predictions as compared to the predictions using the
SN curves as given in the common structural rules.
 Thus with the judicious choice of appropriate parameters,
it is shown that fracture mechanics is well able to predict
the fatigue life of a ship and other structures in detail.
 Collection of data pertaining to initial crack size and shape
may also improve the fatigue life prediction.
 A risk based inspection strategy for ship structures can
also be developed based on the crack growth calculations.
 The effect of strengthening RC beams subjected to fatigue
in flexure is obvious through the improvement in the
serviceability performance (reduced deflection, reduced
crack width, etc).
• However, it will not result in a significant
increase in fatigue life if the cyclic steel stress
range in the tension steel is maintained the same
before and after strengthening.
•Though all methods of fatigue analysis gives
reasonably good results, effort should be made to
make possible the use of fracture mechanics
approach.
•The effect of fatigue loading on the post-fatigue
monotonic behavior in terms of yielding and
ultimate loads and deflections is insignificant.
However, fatigue loading results in a bilinear
response as a result of reaching the full cracking
stage during cycling.
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