An Unifying Approach to assess the structural strength

The aim of this research paper was to define a new approach unifying the different failure modes of a structure. Several relationships, reported in literature and developed by the author, were used to correlate different mechanical properties and were validated by experimental results. The developed theoretical model was focused on the damping, a material property able to correlate vibration parameters with high cycle fatigue parameters and related to the damage of materials and structures. The measure of damping is based on experimental techniques currently used for damage detection, so the Unifying Approach could be applied also for structural health monitoring. Good predictions were achieved applying the new approach to ship structural details.