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Fatigue is still the most common mode of failure in structural and mechanical components.
It is a progressive cracking mechanism which develops as a result of cyclic stress and which can lead to major failures, with severe consequences to plant, equipment, the environment and human lives.
Metals, plastics, composites and ceramics are all susceptible and joints in structural members have particularly poor fatigue strength and must therefore be carefully designed for cyclic loading.
TWI is dedicated to world-class research and development, endeavouring to find the best solutions to your engineering problems to guarantee the continued, safe operation and global competitiveness of your business. TWI draws on over 40 years' expertise in fatigue design, assessment, testing and analysis covering all industry sectors.
TWI provides:
- Fatigue design and assessment
- Fatigue testing of materials, components and structures
- Failure investigations
- Fitness-for-purposes assessment
- Instrumentation and monitoring of structures and companies in-service
- Fatigue crack repair methods and life improvement techniques
TWI also plays an important role in developing fatigue design guidance for joints.
Its 'Fatigue design rules for welded steel joints', first published in 1976, still provides the basis of many national and international fatigue design standards such as BS, Eurocode and IIW documents.
TWI has extensive fatigue testing facilities housed in four separate fatigue laboratories, with machine load capacities from 2 to 2,000kN. Its experience ranges from work on small parent material samples to full-scale tests on large structural connections in operating environments from ambient to specialised corrosive testing conditions at elevated temperature, and loading frequencies from 0.001 to 200Hz.
For more information please contact: fgm@twi.co.uk
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