Nondestructive Testing and Prediction of Remaining Fatigue Life of Metals

A nondestructive testing method is presented for the prediction of the remaining fatigue life (RFL) of metals with prior fatigue damage subjected to tension-compression fatigue load. It is shown that the slope of temperature rise obtained from a short-time excitation fatigue test is a good candidate to assess the present state of fatigue damage in the material. Three series of uniaxial tension-compression normal fatigue tests are carried out with two different materials under different loading conditions to characterize their fatigue behavior. Eight validation tests are performed under different loading conditions to evaluate the RFL prediction capability of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method has good potential for predicting RFL of metallic specimens.