Engineering materials are subjected to fatigue loading in a wide variety of applications in the aeronautical, automotive, nuclear plant, petroleum and transportation industries. The extensive use of engineering materials over such a range of applications plus the cost involved in fatigue failure of materials and structures has resulted in an increasing awareness of the importance of damage and durability under cyclic loading conditions.

Focusing on state-of-the-art advances in the development of methods to predict fatigue performance of materials and structures, this book contains papers from the First International Conference on Fatigue Damage of Materials. The coverage is broad and includes a range of materials and structures as well as different viewpoints and approaches to the fatigue analysis problem.

The 45 contributions featured are divided under the following headings: Case Studies on Fatigue; Computational Methods; Low Cycle Fatigue; Fatigue Crack Initiation; Fatigue Crack Propagation; Fatigue Damage Analysis; Fatigue of Welded Joints; Multiaxial Fatigue; Small Crack Growth and Threshold; Statistical Analysis of Fatigue; and Thermo-Mechanical Fatigue and Creep.