Comparative study of multiaxial fatigue damage models for ductile structural steels and brittle materials

Fatigue damage prediction under a general multiaxial service loading consists of three main steps: multiaxial cycle counting, damage evaluation for an identified cycle (or reversal), and damage accumulations. The accuracy of fatigue life predictions depends on all the above steps. This paper reviews the evolutions of various multiaxial fatigue damage models, a comparative study is conducted about the physical basis, the computational efficiency, and the application range of the approaches. Based on the comparative studies, a new procedure is proposed to evaluate fatigue damage under general multiaxial random loading, which uses the Wang and Brown´s multiaxial cycle counting method for identifying cycles (or reversals), the modified procedure of the minimum circumscribed ellipse (MCE) approach for fatigue damage evaluation for an identified cycle (or reversal), and the Miner´s linear damage law for fatigue damage accumulations. By comparisons of the predicted life results with experimental results and with other approaches, it is shown that the proposed procedure is very efficient and suitable for computer aided structural optimization against fatigue.