• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.38 no.11
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• pp.1245-1256
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• 2014

The physical nature of fatigue shows the considerable amount of scatter from intrinsic and extrinsic factors. In this study, some degradation models, such as the gamma process model, were reviewed in terms of uncertainties associated with the continuous, gradual, and monotonic nature of fatigue crack growth. Statistically varying fatigue crack growth data obtained from Lu and Meeker were used as an example to demonstrate the use of the gamma process model. This model can describe the condition and lifetime as statistical distribution curves whose shapes vary with cycles. From the skewness of the statistical distribution curves, it was confirmed that the median is suitable for being considered as the expected life. The use of the gamma process model enables the optimum replacement period and percentile life to be employed as criteria for preventive maintenance policy.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.1045-1050
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• 2003

In this study, to investigate the effects of omitting low-amplitude cycles from a flight-simulation loading, crack growth tests are conducted on 2124-T851 aluminum alloy specimens. Three test spectra are generated by omitting small load ranges as counted by the rain-flow count method. The crack growth test results are compared with the data obtained from the flight-simulation loading. The experimental results show that omission of the load ranges below 5% of the maximum load does not significantly affect crack growth behavior, because these are below the initial stress intensity factor range. However, in the case of omitting the load ranges below 15% of the maximum load, crack growth rates decrease, and therefore crack growth curve deviates from the crack growth data under the flight-simulation loading. To optimize the load range that can be omitted, crack growth curves are simulated by the stochastic crack growth model. The prediction shows that the omission level can be extended to 8% of the maximum load and test time can be reduced by 59%.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.137-146
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• 1999

Inspection becomes to be important in the safety of structure and economical viewpoint, because structural damage accompanies lots of economical cost and social problems. Especially ship structure is composed of a lot of members and it is impossible to inspect all members continuously. The purpose of this paper is to get optimal inspection plan containing inspection time and method. Crack is one of major modes on the structural failure and can lead to collapse of structure. In this paper, the deteriorating process, which contains inspection to detect the crack before the propagation to large crack, is idealized as Markov chain model. Genetic algorithm is also used to accomplish the optimization of inspection plan. Especially, the probabilistic characteristics of cracks are changed, because ship is operating in corrosive environments and the scantling of structural members is reduced due to corrosion. Non-stationary Markov chain model is used to represent the process of corrosion in structural members. In this paper, the characteristics of indivisual inspection plan are compared by numerical examples for the change of corrosion rate, the cost due to scheduled system down and target failure probability. From the numerical example, it can be seen that the improvement of fatigue life for the members with short fatigue life is the most effective way in order to reduce total maintenance cost.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.339-346
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• 2019

Various studies have been conducted to evaluate the probabilistic fatigue life of steel railway bridges, but many of them are based on a relatively simple model of crack propagation. The model assumes zero minimum stress and constant loading amplitude, which is not appropriate for the fatigue life evaluation of railway bridges. Thus, this study proposes a new probabilistic method employing an advanced crack propagation model that considers the live-dead load ratio for the fatigue life evaluation of steel railway bridges. In addition, by using the rainflow cycle counting algorithm, it can handle variable-amplitude loading, which is the most common loading pattern for railway bridges. To demonstrate the proposed method, it was applied to a numerical example of a steel railway bridge, and the fatigue lives of the major components and structural system were estimated. Furthermore, the effects of various ratios of live-dead loads on bridge fatigue life were examined through a parametric study. As a result, with the increasing live-dead stress ratio from 0 to 5/6, the fatigue lives can be reduced by approximately 30 years at both the component and system levels.