Author(s)

M. Bily & J. Prohacka

Abstract

Computational fatigue life assessment of components exposed to non-stationary loading M. Bily, J. Prohacka Institute of Materials and Machine Mechanics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Racianska 75, 830 08 Bratislava 38, Slovakia ABSTRACT Non-stationary loads appear as a result of operating conditions or of non-linear structural behaviour. They are analysed either by the Rain Flow Method giving a macroblock of sinusoidal cycles or they can be split into segments for which quasi stationary characteristics are computed and further used as inputs to fa- tigue damage accumulation hypotheses. In order to verify the in- fluence of non-stationarities on fatigue life 24 processes with various statistical characteristics were simulated and the fati- gue lives were mutually compared for low carbon steel specimens with one surprising result: various non-stationarities do not substantially effect the resulting fatigue life. This was a

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