Prediction of residual fatigue life of aluminium foam through natural frequencies and damping shift

This paper deals with the application of a non-destructive technique based on natural frequencies and damping evaluation to predict fatigue failure of closed cell aluminium foams. Two different numerical methods have been used to analyse data, and a detailed analysis about frequency and damping evolution of metallic foam specimens subjected to fatigue load is shown. Moreover, significant correlations between modal data changes and the evolution due to the relevant fatigue loads in the high-cycle regime have been extracted; these correlations may be efficiently used to predict the residual life with good accuracy from the beginning of the fatigue tests.