Automotive industries, due to the highly competitive nature of international markets, are undergoing to reduce the time to market of the new products.
The evaluation of durability of components at the design stage could be very effective in order to increase the reliability and to reduce the associated testing time in the experimental fields.
The actual components are subjected to time variable loading so, for a correct fatigue analysis, it is necessary take into account the influences of geometrical effects, the multiaxiality of the loadings and the surface conditions.
The fatigue analysis at the design stage is useful in case a FLP (Fatigue Life Prediction) tool, fully integrated to FEA (Finite Element Analysis) codes, is developed allowing design engineers to do an effective management of these techniques.
A fatigue prediction code named PRINCE (fatigue life PRediction INtegrated to Code for finite Element analysis) was developed in the Reliability and Testing Department at the Fiat Research Centre. Fully integrated with the most FEA commercial codes, PRINCE is able to perform fatigue analysis in terms of Fatigue Safety Coefficient (FSC) and Fatigue Life Prediction also in presence of multiaxiality and variable loadings.
PRINCE was applied on different type of automotive and transport means structural components, showing a good agreement between predicted and experimental results.