Abstract
It is well-known that the fatigue of metallic materials occurs due to the initiation of cracks and their subsequent growth. However, the number of crack nuclei is not provided deterministically. In engineering applications, this number is randomly variable and often significant, and should be taken into account in the evaluation of crack coalescence. In the present study, based on the numbers of initiated cracks, a statistical evaluation was made of the coalescence of cracks as a function of the number of stress cycles, and the fatigue life distribution was probabilistically derived from the above evaluation assuming that the failure occurs immediately after the coalescence of cracks. The analytical results obtained are in good agreement with experimental results of the fatigue life distribution.
