Analysis of components under cyclic loads
The effect of cyclic loads is closely related to fatigue failure, which is another broad topic on its own. In the past chapters, we have based the failure assessments of components that we studied on the idea that failure will happen if a specific stress measure exceeds the yield strength (for ductile components) or the ultimate strength (for brittle components). With fatigue failure, the stress required to bring a component to failure is often far lesser than the yield or ultimate strengths of the material under study. According to numerous studies, more than 50% of machinery breakage can be attributed to fatigue failure [4, 5]. While this section is not intended to cover fatigue failure in detail, we will outline four major concepts that you need to be aware of to conduct a basic fatigue analysis:
- Stress-time or load-time cycle: This is the plot of stress/load versus time that describes the cyclical nature of the stress/load applied...