An innovative and sustainable methodology for fatigue characterization and design

Most failures in engineering components and structures are determined by the fatigue phenomenon, known for being lengthy to be experimentally investigated and challenging to be properly accounted in design. These aspects can represent a barrier for companies working on the edge of new technologies due to the duty and need to ensure reliability for their products. This study aims to propose a methodology to couple the economic and sustainability advantages of Thermographic Methods in investigating the fatigue behaviour of materials with those of local approaches to provide a simple, yet reliable, fatigue design tool. To pursue this aim we intentionally conducted in the present paper the minimum required experimental campaign needed by Thermographic Methods to achieve the basic information to calibrate a local approach, the Strain Energy Density one. The proposed methodology has been satisfactorily validated by applying the calibrated local approach to foresee the fatigue behaviour of a vast experimental database, characterized by a variety of notched geometries, retrieved from literature.