Design against fatigue by a similarity method

peer reviewedThe essential difficulty of the design against fatigue lies in the fact that the fatigue strength depends not only on the material, but also on the scale. It is true that models do exsist from long, but they are limited to those geometries with known stress concentration factor and known gradient. Now, there exist a lot of problems for which these two parameters are not known, the most obvious being the press-fitted assembly. Such cases will be called unpredictable notches. The aim of the present communication is to present a similarity method leading to a liable prediction of the behaviour of such notches, from partial experimental data. Comaparing the results of the present method to publishes results, a fair agreement is found