Abstract
It is desirable to evaluate the fatigue limit of commercial products in order to ensure the appropriateness of fatigue design. However, fatigue testing of real products is very difficult to conduct because it requires huge cost, namely a large number of loading cycles using many specimens. In order to overcome such difficulty, the rapid evaluation technique using infrared thermography has been developed and paid attention recently. Unfortunately, the technique has not been established very well yet, especially in the aspect of data processing to determine the fatigue limit appropriately. In this research, data processing techniques were investigated in detail to determine the fatigue limit for type 304 stainless steel specimens with various notches. As a result, a series of data processing techniques which dose not require human judgement has been established for rapid evaluation of the fatigue limit using infrared thermography.
