Fatigue reliability of structural components

The paper is concerned with reliability assessment of structural and mechanical components subjected to cyclic variable amplitude service load. Due to relatively easy simulation and simple computational procedure, computer simulations based on the Monte Carlo method are often used for reliability assessments of engineering objects. The only disadvantage of such a method is a large number of repetitions of the fatigue-life assessment procedure required for attaining good accuracy in the range of high levels of reliability. Useful tips enabling the decrease of the number of samplings in the simulation procedure and preserving required reliability levels are the subjects of the discussion presented below. The rules for dimensioning structures and mechanical components using the deterministic and probabilistic input data have been formulated, and the relation between the safety factor and the fatigue-failure probability of structural components has been analysed as well.