Innovative Planning in-Service Inspections of Fatigued Structures Under Parametric Uncertainty of Lifetime Models

The main aim of this paper is to present more accurate stochastic fatigue models for solving the fatigue reliability problems, which are attractively simple and easy to apply in practice for situations where it is difficult to quantify the costs associated with inspections and undetected cracks. From an engineering standpoint the fatigue life of a structure consists of two periods: (i) crack initiation period, which starts with the first load cycle and ends when a technically detectable crack is presented, and (ii) crack propagation period, which starts with a technically detectable crack and ends when the remaining cross section can no longer withstand the loads applied and fails statically. Periodic inspections of fatigued structures, which are common practice in order to maintain their reliability above a desired minimum level, are based on the conditional reliability of the fatigued structure. During the period of crack initiation, when the parameters of the underlying lifetime distributions are not assumed to be known, for effective in-service inspection planning (with decreasing intervals as alternative to constant intervals often used in practice for convenience in operation), the pivotal quantity averaging (PQA) approach is offered. During the period of crack propagation (when the damage tolerance situation is used), the approach, based on an innovative crack growth equation, to in-service inspection planning (with decreasing intervals between sequential inspections) is proposed to construct more accurate reliability-based inspection strategy in this case. To illustrate the suggested approaches, the numerical examples are given.