A state-of-art review is given to the new advances on fatigue reliability design and analysis methods of Chinese railway vehicle＇s structures. First, the structures are subject to a complicated random fatigue stressing history and this history should be determined by combining dynamic simulation and on-line inspection. Second, the random fatigue constitutions belong to an intrinsic fatigue phenomenon and a probabilistic model is developed to well describe them with two measurements of survival probability and confidence, similar model is also presented for the random stress-life rela- tions and extrapolated appropriately into Song fatigue life regime. Third, concept of the fatigue limit should be understood as the fatigue strength at a given fatigue life and a so-called local Basquin model method is proposed for measuring the random strengths. In addition, drawing and application methods of the Goodman-Smith diagram for integrally characterizing the random fatigue strengths are established in terms of ten kilometers. Fourth, a reliability stress-based method is constructed with a consideration of the random constitutive relations. These new advances form a new frame work for railway fatigue reliability design and analysis.
When the historic probabilistic S-N curves are given under special survival probability and confidence levels and there is no possible to re-test, fatigue reliability analysis at other levels can not be done except for the special levels. Therefore, the wide applied curves are expected. Monte Carlo reconstruction methods of the test data and the curves are investigated under fatigue life following lognormal distribution. To overcome the non-conservative assessment of existent man-made enlarging the sample size up to thousands, a simulation policy is employed to address the true production where the sample size is controlled less than 20 for material specimens, 10 for structural component specimens and the errors matching the statistical parameters are less than 5 percent. Availability and feasibility of the present methods have been indicated by the reconstruction practice of the test data and curves for 60Si2Mn high strength spring steel of railway industry.
