Probabilistic formulation of Miner's rule and application to structural fatigue
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The standard stress-based approach to fatigue is based on the use of S-N curves. They are obtained by applying cyclic loading of constant amplitude S to identical and standardised specimens until they fail. The S-N curves actually depend on a reference probability p: for a given cycle amplitude S, they provide the number of cycles at which a proportion p of specimens have failed. Based on the S-N curves, Miner's rule is next used to predict the number of cycles to failure of a specimen subjected to cyclic loading with variable amplitude. In this article, we present a probabilistic formulation of Miner's rule, which is based on the introduction of the notion of health of a specimen. We show the consistency of that new formulation with the standard approaches, thereby providing a precise probabilistic interpretation of these. Explicit formulas are derived in the case of the Weibull–Basquin model. We next turn to the case of a complete mechanical structure: taking into account size effects, and using the weakest link principle, we establish formulas for the survival probability of the structure. We illustrate our results by numerical simulations on a I-steel beam, for which we compute survival probabilities and density of failure point. We also show how to efficiently approximate these quantities using the Laplace method.
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