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Abstract.A new approach is explored to predict the fatigue life of 2024-T42 aluminum subjected to variable amplitude loading. The predicted fatigue lives are compared with the experimental data and those predicted by Miner's rule, which show that the fatigue lives predicted by the proposed approach agree well with the experimental results and most of the errors are within a factor of 2. The proposed approach gives better prediction than the Miner's rule owing to the fact that it can take into account the loading history. Furthermore, the theoretical results tend to be non-conservative for the decreasing loading and the predicted results underestimate the experimental lives for the increasing loading.

The proposed approach was extended to fatigue life prediction for 6082-T6 aluminum alloy under multi-level variable amplitude loading. The test data were compared with fatigue lives calculated by the proposed method. The results showed that predicted lives based on this method were in good agreement with the experimental data, which indicated that the approach can be applicable to fatigue life prediction for 6082-T6 aluminum alloy subjected to variable amplitude loading. The deviation of assessed fatigue lives of aluminum alloy by the approach was lower than Miner's results. In addition, a fatigue life prediction system was developed by Microsoft visual studio 2010 and the C# computer programming language. It can be obtained from the validation results that the system-predicted fatigue lives of 6082-T6 aluminum alloy were in good agreement with the results calculated by proposed approach, which indicated that the prediction system was acceptable for fatigue life prediction of 6082-T6 under variable amplitude loading.