Probabilistic assessment of the fatigue reliability

The prediction of stochastic crack growth accumulation is important for the reliability analysis of structures as well as the scheduling of inspection and repair/replacement maintenance. Because the initial crack size, the stress, the material properties and other factors that may affect the fatigue crack growth are statistically distributed, the fi rst-order second-moment technique is often adopted to calculate the fatigue reliability of industrial structures. In this paper, a second-order thirdmoment technique is presented and a three-parameter Weibull distribution is adopted to refl ect the infl uences of skewness of the probability density function. The second-order third-moment technique that has more characteristics of those random variables that are concerned in reliability analysis is obviously more accurate than the traditional fi rst-order second-moment technique.