An analytical relation between Weibull's and Basquin's laws for smooth and notched specimens and application to constant amplitude fatigue

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical method to relate Weibull's and Basquin's fatigue laws, calibrates parameters for smooth and notched specimens, and validates the approach with experimental data on aluminum and steel alloys.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical calibration procedure linking Weibull's and Basquin's laws, accounting for scatter increase at lower stress amplitudes, and extends the method to notched specimens.

Findings

Calibration parameters depend on material but not on stress concentration.

The slope factor varies with material and affects life prediction scatter.

Validated with experimental data on aluminum and steel alloys.

Abstract

Starting from the classical definition of stress-life Wohler curve in the form of Basquin's law, an analytical procedure for the calibration of the four parameters Wohler curve (Weibull's law) for a plain specimen is proposed. The obtained parameters are then adjusted by means of an additional slope factor preserving the inflection point of the curve while changing its slope in order to model the experimental observations in which an increase of the scatter in life prediction is observed when reducing the stress amplitude. The same approach has then been adopted to calibrate the Weibull's law parameters for a notched specimen, and the fitting slope factor has been found to be a value that changes with the material but remains constant with the stress concentration factor. The findings have been validated with existing experimental data on 2024-T3 aluminum alloy and normalized SAE 4130 steel.