Shell Special Intensive Training Programme

9.0: FATIGUE DESIGN CRITERIA:

For completeness, it is pertinent to note various criteria that are being used by
practising Engineers to combat Fatigue Failure of materials. Criteria for fatigue
design have evolved from the so-called infinite life to damage tolerance. Each
criterion considers the fact that fatigue life is a probability that certain percentage of
samples tested at a particular stress level after a particular number of cycles. failed.
Thus a typical stress-life curve simply represents the best fit curves which have been
drawn through average-value data points. A constant probability curve , P , of 0.9
indicates that at various stress levels and lives 90% of the samples tested failed.
Various design criteria are listed below:

• Infinite- Life Design

Here the design stresses are kept safely below the pertinent fatigue limit stress
and is suitable for parts subjected to many millions of almost uniform cycles,
like engine valve springs.

• Safe-Life Design

Some designers especially automobile designers learned to use parts that if

tested at a maximum expected stress or load , would last only some hundred
thousands of cycles instead of many millions. In a suspension spring or in a
reverse gear , the maximum load or stress may never occur during the life of a
car, designing for a finite life under such loads is quite satisfactory. The practice
of designing for a finite life is known as safe-life design. This practice is used in
pressure vessel design. The safe-life design must include a margin for the
scatter of fatigue results. The margin for safety in safe-life design may be taken
in terms of life (e.g. , calculated life = 20 x desired life ), in terms of load ( e.g.
assumed load x expected load ), or specifying that both margins must be
satisfied , as in the ASME Boiler Code. Ball bearings and roller bearings are
noteworthy examples of safe-life design. The ratings for such bearings are
often given in terms of a reference load that 90% of all such bearings are
expected to withstand for a given lifetime, for instance, 3000 hours at 500 RPM
or 90m million revolutions.

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• Fail- Safe Design

This was developed by aircraft engineers. The added weight required by large
safety factors and danger to lives implied by small safety factors cannot be
tolerated in the aircraft or delicate structures. Fail-safe design recognises the
fact that defects may occur in structures and hence arranges the structure so
that these defects or cracks will not lead to the failure of the structure before
they are detected and repaired. Multiple load paths and crack stoppers built at
intervals into the structure are some of the means of used to achieve fail-safe
design.

• Damage Tolerant Design

This is a refinement of the fail-safe design philosophy. This concept assumes

that cracks will exist --- caused either by processing or fatigue - and uses
fracture mechanics analyses to and tests to check whether such cracks will
grow to large enough to produce failure before they are sure to be detected by
periodic inspection. The design philosophy looks for materials with slow crack
growth and high fracture toughness. In pressure vessel design "leak before
burst" is an expression of this philosophy.

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