Components Durability, Reliability and Uncertainty Assessments Based on Fatigue Failure Data

Road vibrations cause fatigue failures in vehicle components and systems. Therefore, reliable and accurate damage and life assessment is crucial to the durability and reliability performances of vehicles, especially at early design stages. However, durability and reliability assessment is difficult not only because of the unknown underlying damage mechanisms, such as crack initiation and crack growth, but also due to the large uncertainties introduced by many factors during operation. How to effectively and accurately assess the damage status and quantitatively measure the uncertainties in a damage evolution process is an important but still unsolved task in engineering probabilistic analysis. In this paper, a new procedure is developed to assess the durability and reliability performance, and characterize the uncertainties of damage evolution of components under constant amplitude loadings. The linear and two nonlinear probabilistic damage accumulation models are briefly described first. Then, fatigue failure life data are combined with the damage accumulation rules to derive the probabilistic damage evolution models. Subsequently, a new uncertainty measure recently developed by the authors is introduced. Finally, several examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the new damage and life assessment procedure.