Development of a bending fatigue testing machine

Knowledge regarding properties of materials is of utmost importance for engineering applications. The study of these properties is crucial for the development of new equipment or products and an important property is the fatigue resistance of materials. The goal of this work is to design and build a fatigue machine for bending tests. Machine design has been split in different groups, namely structural, dynamic and control and data acquisition, each of them consisting of parts and accessories required to perform fatigue tests. A novel system for variation of the applied stress was developed, which is simpler and as effective as those traditionally used in commercial machines. Validation tests were performed using annealed AISI 1020 steel specimens and indicated that the machine presents satisfactory performance, thus allowing the generation of reliable data for plotting Wohler curve.