Crack propagation rate and failure life in biaxial low cycle fatigue at elevated temperatures

Prognostic models based on statistical flowgraphs

“…Fatigue cracking, in which a structural member cracks and eventually fractures under cyclic loading, is thought to be responsible for at least half of all mechanical and structural failures [22, Section 1.1], with a yearly economic loss estimated at upwards of $50 billion in the US alone [23,Section 4.1]. Rather than try to summarize the vast literature on fatigue cracking, we refer the reader to [22,24,25] and references therein; the book by Sobczyk and Spencer [24], in particular, is a comprehensive review of stochastic models for fatigue.…”