Statistical aspects of fatigue life and endurance limit

Based on the assumption that the fatigue life and endurance limit is mainly controlled by the materials particle distribution, different possible statistical distributions to describe the fatigue have been assessed. Some distributions lead to high statistical uncertainty or physically non‐realistic size effects. It is shown that, if the maximum particle size distribution is described by a Frechet distribution, both the fatigue life, as well as the endurance limit are described by a Weibull distribution.