Abstract – The service life of materials and components is limited when they are subjected to repeated mechanical stresses, which is why an understanding of the damage development and the estimation of the service life based on it are of great importance for technical applications. This paper shows how temperature measurement methods can be used to comprehensively describe the alternating deformation behavior and to derive parameters that can be used in short-term service life calculation methods.

Along with StressLife and StrainLife, SteBLife is one of these short-term methods that has been developed in recent years and already shows enormous potential for quickly providing fatigue data in the form of Wöhler curves.

When calculating service life using SteBLife, only three to five fatigue tests with a stepped fatigue specimen are required to determine a complete Wöhler curve with scatter bands for different fracture probabilities. In fact, if only a trend Wöhler curve is needed, only a single test is required. This procedure is presented in this paper using the example of the unalloyed carbon steel C45E in the normalized condition.