Fatigue design of engineering structures is typically based on lifetime calculation using a cumulative damage law. The linear damage rule by Miner is the universal standard for fatigue design even though numerous experimental studies have shown its deficiencies and possible non-conservative outcomes. In an effort to overcome these deficiencies, many nonlinear cumulative damage models and life prediction models have been developed since; however, none of them have found wide acceptance. This review article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the art in cumulative damage and lifetime prediction models for endurance based high-cycle fatigue design of metal structures.

This work addresses the lack of focus on verification and comparison of existing fatigue damage accumulation and life prediction models on the basis of large and well-documented experiment datasets. Sixty-four constant amplitude, 54 two-level block loading, and 27 three-level block loading valid experiments were performed in order to generate an open-access, high-quality dataset that can be used as a benchmark for existing models. In the future, more experiments of various specimen geometries and loading conditions will be added. The obtained dataset was used for a study comparing five (non)linear fatigue damage and life prediction models. It is shown how the performance of several (non)linear damage models is strongly dependent on the considered material dataset and loading sequence. Therefore, it is important to verify models with a broad set of independent datasets, as many existing models show significant bias to certain datasets.