A nonlinear fatigue damage accumulation model considering strength degradation and its applications to fatigue reliability analysis

Fatigue is a damage accumulation process in which the material property deteriorates and degenerates continuously under cyclic loading. The analysis of damage accumulation plays a key role in preventing the occurrence of fatigue failures, and the damage evolution mechanism is one of the important focuses of fatigue behavior. In this paper, a residual strength degradation model according to the stress–strength interference (SSI) model is introduced firstly; then a modified nonlinear fatigue damage accumulation model based on the Manson–Halford theory is proposed. Combining the proposed nonlinear damage accumulation model with the residual strength degradation model, a new method is developed for fatigue life prediction under constant and variable amplitude loading, which considers not only the effects of load interactions, but also the phenomenon of strength degradation of materials induced by loading history, and it can be used to predict the reliability and fatigue life of mechanical components. Moreover, the material parameter for the residual strength degradation can be obtained directly from S–N curve without running extra experiments. Finally, experimental data are used to compare with the predicted value in order to demonstrate the proposed residual strength degradation model. In addition, two sets of experimental data are also used to verify the proposed nonlinear fatigue damage accumulation model which is applied to predict fatigue life under two-stress level loading and reliability prediction under multi-stress level loading. The results show that the proposed method has a good agreement between the experimental data and predicted values.