How Things Break: Fatigue (Webinar)

In How Things Break: Fatigue, you'll learn ...

• The basic mechanisms of fatigue failure
• The response of various materials to cyclic loading
• How designers can estimate and reduce the effects of fatigue

Overview

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Fatigue occurs when a material experiences repeated applications of a relatively low stress. Designers have long been aware that materials can become “tired,” and as early as 1829 Wilhem Augustus Julius Albert performed the first metal fatigue experiments in response to failures at the Clausthal Mines.

To this day, fatigue remains one of the leading causes of in-service component failure. Since fatigue failures can occur without warning, proper design is critical.

It’s important to understand the difference between failure and fatigue, so that’s where we begin the webinar. After establishing that difference, we’ll explore four design philosophies that engineers use when planning for fatigue:

• Infinite Life Design
• Safe Life Design
• Fail Safe Design
• Damage Tolerant Design

This webinar presents an overview of the material fatigue phenomenon, along with the methods used by engineers to estimate component life under cyclic loading.

The study is brought to life with several case studies presented to illustrate the concepts.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this webinar, participants will be able to:

• Explain the fundamentals of fatigue failure
• Describe the characteristics of various materials under cyclic loading
• Identify visual indications of fatigue on fracture surfaces
• Interpret S-N curves
• Explain the influence of environment and geometry on fatigue
• Describe the effect of manufacturing processes on component life
• Apply calculation methods to estimate component life
• Identify design practices that can extend the life of cyclically loaded components
• Analyze case studies of fatigue failures