The best crash course on safe-life, fail safe, and damage tolerant design certification principles. Learn methods to assess initiation and propagation of fatigue damage in engineering structures and materials.
Fatigue fractures may occur as a consequence of cyclic loading structures. In particular within the context of fatigue and damage tolerance certification, engineers should have the knowledge and skills to analyse and assess fatigue life and fatigue performance. This includes the ability to design against fatigue, and to validate designs with validated fatigue strength justifications. Fatigue fractures and related structural failures may be caused by a variety of factors, such as quality of applied materials, the production technology, the structural design, inappropriate reliability calculations, underestimations of load spectra, and inappropriate use of structures. With so many possible factors an integral and rigorous engineering approach is required.
This course will provide you with the knowledge and skills to identify potential critical locations and sources of poor fatigue performance; to develop strategies to avoid fatigue fractures and to improve fatigue performance of structures.
The course suits mainly aerospace engineers whose responsibilities include aircraft structures. However civil engineers, structural engineers, as well as engineers working in the manufacturing industry would benefit as well from high level review of fatigue life assessment and damage growth.
For anyone working on development, design or strength justification of engineering structures this course will be invaluable. It will not only cover the methods and best practices, but also explain thoroughly the fundamentals that allow to assess the limits of current practices, and ways to overcome such limitations. In short, you will become a fatigue and damage tolerance specialist!
Interpret and discuss the fatigue fracture features with respect to the characteristics of each phase in fatigue life.
Define and determine stress concentration factors for notched structures with or without residual stresses.
Explain and discuss S-N curves with respect to mean stress, material surface effects, and scatter, and perform fatigue life analyses considering mean stress and notch root plasticity.
Assess the fatigue life of tension and shear joints, and explain limitations to the similarity principles.
Explain Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics concepts for damage growth, and perform crack growth analyses with these concepts.
Explain the consequences of variable- and constant amplitude loading on fatigue life and damage growth, and perform fatigue life analyses for arbitrary load spectra.
Explain the effect of environment on fatigue life and fatigue phenomena.
Perform residual strength analyses.