Professional Documents
Culture Documents
01 Rainflow Cycle Counting A Historical Perspective4
01 Rainflow Cycle Counting A Historical Perspective4
Darrell Socie
Mechanical Engineering Department
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1. Introduction
The local strain approach for fatigue analysis is
now routinely used throughout the world for assessing the
durability of structures and components. This approach
was made possible by four key developments:
* Coffin's and Manson's work that established
plastic strain as the controlling parameter for
fatigue damage,
* Morrow's and Topper's work on simulating the
stresses and strains of notched members,
* Commercial development of the closed loop
servohydraulic materials testing machine by
Johnson,and
* Endo's invention of the rainflow cycle counting
method.
All of this work has stood the test of twenty-five years
of careful scrutiny by researchers and engineers. In
this conference, Fatigue Damage Measurement and
Evaluation Under Complex Loadings, we honor the memory of
Tatsuo Endo for his lasting contribution to science and
industry. This paper briefly reviews the original work
followed by a series of major events that have led to the
widespread acceptance of the method.
2. Endo's Original Work
The original presentation of the rainflow method was
contained in a series of two papers presented to the
Kyushu District Meeting of the Japanese Society of
Mechanical Engineers in November, 1967:
El 5. fcfiM*^U**^*tf<^*
4 XiM *>*&*? **&&&J $-&*&
' (5. SOtt **JX
12fe.**-:& KM * %ru&.
CL
I
-1000
-0.005
0.005
10