Fatigue life prediction of metallic materials considering mean stress effects by means of an artificial neural network

Abstract The mean stress effect plays an important role in the fatigue life predictions, its influence significantly changes high-cycle fatigue behaviour, directly decreasing the fatigue limit with the increase of the mean stress. Fatigue design of structural details and mechanical components must account for mean stress effects in order to guarantee the performance and safety criteria during their foreseen operational life. The purpose of this research work is to develop a new methodology to generate a constant life diagram (CLD) for metallic materials, based on assumptions of Haigh diagram and artificial neural networks, using the probabilistic Stussi fatigue S-N fields. This proposed methodology can estimate the safety region for high-cycle fatigue regimes as a function of the mean stress and stress amplitude in regions where tensile loading is predominance, using fatigue S-N curves only for two stress R-ratios. In this approach, the experimental fatigue data of the P355NL1 pressure vessel steel available for three stress R-ratios (−1, −0.5, 0), are used. A multilayer perceptron network has been trained with the back-propagation algorithm; its architecture consists of two input neurons ( σ m , N ) and one output neuron ( σ a ). The suggested CLD based on trained artificial neural network algorithm and probabilistic Stussi fatigue fields applied to dog-bone shaped specimens made of P355NL1 steel showed a good agreement with the high-cycle fatigue experimental data, only using the stress R-ratios equal to 0 and −0.5. Furthermore, a procedure for estimating the fatigue resistance reduction factor, K f , for the fatigue life prediction of structural details (stress R-ratios equal to 0, 0.15 and 0.3) in extrapolation regions is suggested and used to generate the K f results for stress R-ratios from −1 to 0.3, based on machine learning artificial neural network algorithm.