The Reliability of a Component Under Several Distributed Cyclic Numbers at the Corresponding Constant Cyclic Stress Levels

Abstract

The probabilistic stress-number of cycles curve (P-S-N curve) approach is widely accepted for describing the fatigue strengths of materials. It is also a widely accepted fatigue theory for determining the reliability of a component under fatigue loadings. However, it is an unsolved issue in the P-S-N curve approach that the calculation of reliability of a component under several distributed cyclic numbers at the corresponding constant cyclic stress levels. Based on the commonly accepted concept of the equivalent fatigue damage, this paper proposes a new method to determine the reliability of the component under several distributed cyclic numbers at the corresponding constant cyclic stress levels. Four examples including two validation examples will be provided to demonstrate how to implement the proposed method for reliability calculation under such fatigue cyclic loading spectrum. The relative errors in validation examples are very small. So, the proposed method can be used to evaluate the reliability of a component under several distributed cyclic number at different stress levels.