Fatigue Damage

Prevention of unexpected failures is a fundamental design objective in any engineering structure or system subjected to fatigue. Nevertheless, the complexity of modern structures and the interactivity among engineering systems, coupled with human fallibility, means that failure and its consequences can only be avoided to a statistical probability. Hence, occasional catastrophic failures will occur, with some of them involving the loss of human lives. Within the last few decades, a dramatic advancement has been achieved in many of the necessary technologies to either avoid or mitigate the consequences of failure. This advancement is associated with ever-increasing performance objectives for materials, structures, and machines, an increased complexity of engineered products and processes. Alongside this, catastrophic failure and its consequences are considered less tolerable in society as a whole; this ensures that efforts to prevent unexpected failures are now a cornerstone in modern engineering design and, simultaneously, a technological and scientific challenge. There is an increasing acknowledgement in the engineering community that the response to this challenge, that is, prevention of catastrophic failure, generally requires a systems approach and necessitates engagement of a large pool of multidisciplinary expertise and the deployment of tools for systems analysis. This multidisciplinary pool includes materials science, structural analysis, manufacturing technologies, quality control and evaluation, mathematics, physics, and probability and reliability. Furthermore, from the scientific point of view, there is also an increasing acknowledgement that addressing the complex engineering problems of today requires the use of concepts and approaches that can account for sizeand time-scaling effects. The Special Issue scope embraces interdisciplinary work aimed at understanding and deploying physics of fatigue and failure techniques, advancing experimental and theoretical failure analysis, modelling of the structural response with respect to both local and global failures, and structural design that accounts for scale and time effects in preventing engineering failures.