Fatigue life and crack growth prediction of metallic structures: A review

Metals fatigue is arguably a leading cause of structural failure. The safe life approach, together with the damage tolerance philosophy, is used to safeguard the components from failure due to fatigue. Prediction of fatigue life for structural components is an important input required for damage tolerant assessments including a fail-safe approach. There are numerous semi-analytical and numerical models available to predict the fatigue life of structural and engineering components. These available models use physical or field variables in the engineering component for fatigue life prediction. When such models are based on the Paris’ law, they are typically aligned with the fail-safe design philosophy. This review presents an overview of fatiguelife assessments for metallic components, providing insights into crack initiation sites and growth orientations and relating them to the fatigue failure mechanisms and life evaluations. A documented and combined basis on the topic of fatigue life and fatigue crack growth is indeed fundamental to achieve well-grounded conclusions leading to a proper understanding of such phenomena collectively and to the development of novel design methodologies. Also, this work aims to provide a classification of the various approaches, methodologies and models developed to assist in the selection of suitable fatigue models and to ensure the necessary degree of reliability for several metallic applications.