Fatigue life design of components under variable amplitude loading with respect to cyclic material behaviour

Load carrying components are subjected to variable amplitude loading for an extensive proportion of their life time. The available methods for fatigue life design can be divided into global and local approaches with reference to the system in which they evaluate the stress vs. endurance relation. The so called material based approach considers the elastic-plastic material behaviour through a combination of the local and the global approach, improving the transferability of material fatigue properties to arbitrary geometries while reducing the numerical effort for fatigue life estimation.