A METHOD FOR ESTIMATING PARAMETERS OF P-S-N CURVES BASED ON WEIBULL DISTRIBUTION

An S-N curve is a traditional tool for design against fatigue. Because there is often a considerable amount of scatter in fatigue performance of specimens, The P-S-N curves capturing the probability of failure should be employed instead of S-N curves. In order to minimize the time and the number of specimens required for fatigue test, many researches had been done. Most studies were focused on a three-parameter S-N curve model; lognormal distribution and maximum likelihood estimation were employed to estimate unknown parameters. In this paper, a three-parameter Weibull distribution is used to describe the scatter of fatigue life. The relationship among survival probability, stress level and fatigue life is considered. A method for estimating parameters of P-S-N curves is proposed. According to this method, three groups of specimens are needed. Each group is submitted to a stress level. The parameters of P-S-N curves can be estimated by solving a set of nonlinear equations. And a numerical example shows that the method is effective.