Statistics of Random Loading with Fatigue

Abstract

Under random excitation, the fatigue crack growth of a structure depends primarily on the statistics of rises and falls of the random response process. Based on the envelope statistics, a close-form solution, expressed in terms of the hypergeometric function, for approximating the rise and fall statistics of random processes is presented. The solution is very simple to compute and its accuracy is very satisfactory when the random response process is reasonably narrow band.