A method to reduce the sampling variability of time-domain fatigue life by optimizing parameters in Monte Carlo simulations

Monte Carlo numerical simulations for generating stationary Gaussian random time-domain signal samples fulfil an important role in random fatigue life prediction. Control parameters such as the random seed, the sampling frequency and the number of sampling points in the numerical simulations have significant effects on the time-domain random fatigue life. In this paper, the effects are investigated systematically by utilizing commonly used power spectrum samples and engineering materials, and so a new method for optimizing the control parameter values is proposed. The proposed method solves the critical problem found in many papers that the relative error between the frequency-domain fatigue life and the time-domain fatigue life increases with the slope K of the S–N curve. Furthermore, it observably reduces the sampling variability of time-domain fatigue life for the large slope K, which will help the related researchers to establish better frequency-domain models for fatigue life prediction by using the time-domain fatigue life values as standard data.