Design to Prevent Fatigue
Learn how to determine fatigue strength in materials, calculate fatigue life, and design with it in mind.
In 1954, two crashes involving the world’s first commercial airliner, the de Havilland Comet, brought the words “metal fatigue” to newspaper headlines and into long-lasting public consciousness. The aircraft, also one of the first to have a pressurized cabin, had square windows. Pressurizationcombined with repeated flight loads caused cracks to form in the corners of the windows, and those cracks widened over time until the cabins fell apart. As well as being a human tragedy in which 68 people died, the Comet disasters were a wake-up call to engineers trying to create safe, strong designs.
