Fatigue failures from defects in additive manufactured components: A statistical methodology for the analysis of the experimental results

The fatigue response of additive manufactured (AMed) components is generally controlled by the defect population, and the models for assessing the fatigue response of AMed parts have to take into account the distribution of defect size and the intrinsic scatter associated to the fatigue response. In the present paper, a statistical methodology for analyzing the results of tests on AMed specimens failed due to cracks originating from defects is proposed. The procedure involves the estimation of the distribution of the fatigue life, which is considered dependent on the applied stress amplitude and on the defect size. Thereafter, all the experimental failures are shifted at a reference number of cycles to failure or stress amplitude, making it possible to compare data obtained at different stress levels or number of cycles to failure. The proposed method has been successfully validated on literature dataset, proving its effectiveness and general validity.