Reliability analysis of mechanical components based on a nonlinear fatigue damage accumulation model

The dynamic reliability models of mechanical components with the failure mode of fatigue are mainly based on the linear damage accumulation theory, which is also called the Miner’s rule. But the Miner’s rule has some drawbacks and results in the disagreement between the predicted and experimental value. In this paper, a dynamic reliability model is presented based on a nonlinear fatigue damage accumulation model. First, a modified nonlinear fatigue damage accumulation model based on the Manson–Halford theory is proposed, which considers not only the effect of load sequence but also the influence of load interaction. Some sets of experimental data are used to verify the proposed nonlinear fatigue damage accumulation model under two-stress level loading and multilevel staged loading. The results show that the proposed method has a better agreement between the experimental data and predicted values than the Miner’s rule. Then, based on the modified nonlinear fatigue damage accumulation model, the dynamic reliability model is presented. The data obtained by this dynamic reliability model are compared with Monte Carlo results, and it shows good agreement with Monte Carlo results