Strength Of Materials Laboratory

Mutah University

College of Engineering

Mechanical Engineering Department

Fatigue Test

05/11/2024

by

Mohmmad Saleh Al-Maaitah

Submitted to:

Dr.Ramadan Jabr Eng. AbudlNasser Ashour

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 Fatigue Test

Object and preface :

That’s why we do the Fatigue Test that gives us a picture of the material’s life span and how
many cycles until failure, which gives us the ability to design the material to withstand a specific
stress that will not cause the material to fail early.

We use different techniques and machines to do the test, we will consider the RR Moore Fatigue
test that uses a motor to rotate our test specimen, see the picture below of one type of the
machine and the second figure is the one we used in our calculations.

Figure 1 Figure

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Theory and used equations :
To consider the failure to be a fatigue failure it must have the following requirements:

A- The caused stress must be lower than the yield strength of the specimen (that’s why
we do a tensile test before the fatigue test to stay away from the yield stress)
B- It must go through number of cycles and not a static load
C- The load must alternate between values

- From the bending stress theory:

σ = My/I

where, σ : Stress
M: Bending moment (M = mgL)
I: Second moment of inertia

This is the main equation we use to calculate the stress

σ = 32M / πd^3

where we have d = 4 mm

and we use for every M after changing the M = mgL

where, m: the mass

g: 9.81 m/s

L: length to the end of string horizontally from the center of the specimen

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Procedure of testing and things that affect the test :
What affect the test:

(a) We may strengthen the material by polishing the outer surface which will eliminate cracks
that will affect the test (highly polished have higher fatigue resistance).

(b) Type of loading (most damaging type is ± σ i.e. the complete reversed stress)

(c) Specimen shape (corners and notches are the weakest point to fatigue).

Procedure of the testing:

1- Load the specimen in its place and link it with the string that is attached to a mass (that
will cause the stress)
2- Eliminate some of shaft’s mass that transmit motion and provide support by using a
counter mass
3- Put the safety nest
4- Turn on the motor (we use it to change the direction of the stress)
5- After failure change the load and repeat and note your results.

- We note that the clicker clicks for one revolution of the big shaft, but we are interested
in the smaller shaft carrying the specimen.

Test graph :
We graph using excel with a semi-log scale and note that the cycles are for the specimen.

See the graph in the next page.

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We don’t note obviously the endurance limit i.e. when the stress that will give us a long life or
cycles for the material and it’s usually a million cycle.

So, I drew another chart with normal scales (non-logarithmic) and I noticed the endurance limit,
see the figure in the next page and the requirement calculations based on it

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 Stress-Cycles Fatigue curve for mild-steel
460.0

440.0
450.0

420.0
400.0

400.0 380.0

360.0
Stress (S) (N / m2)

340.0
350.0
320.0
300.0

290.0
300.0

260.0

250.0

200.0
0.0001 0.5001 1.0001 1.5001 2.0001 2.5001 3.0001 3.5001

Number of cycles (non lograthmic) in Millions)

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Extracted properties from the graph :
A – Critical values

* The critical stress: σ = 260 Mpa

* The critical number of cycles: N = 3.16 million revolutions

B - Maximum values

* The maximum stress and the corresponding number of cycles:

σ = 460 Mpa with a N =54600 Cycles

 We conclude that to have a long number of cycles (we may say life)
we have to put this material in a stress that is in the range of 250
Mpa.

Books used: Strength of materials by D.Saloom J And Mechanics of Materials by Hibbeler.

Please if you have any notes on this report, inform to improve next time. THANK YOU!