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In almost all cases of the estimation of fatigue limit for structural materials and bearing steels, the practice of using S-N curves obtained by plotting the applied stress against the number of stress cycles has been continuing to date. It usually takes into account the probabilistic approach of dealing with the stress or force life for only median life. Therefore, a new approach to life estimation and the fatigue limit concept is proposed by using a three-parameter Weibull distribution consisting of a minimum life as the third parameter with a normalized constant Weibull slope m (Shimizu [Citation4]). The values of m obtained in the previous paper from life tests for bearing steel were found to be in the range of m = 1.3 to 1.8. In this article, a constant mean value, 
= 1.5, is used for the analysis and is considered to be independent of the life distributions for any given experimental stress levels. It is made clear that the stress or load life exponent of the P-S-N/P-F-L (probabilistic stress/force life) curve has a constant value for any probability of failures and that it depends on the Weibull slope.
Presented at the ASME/STLE Tribology Conference in Long Beach, California October 24-27, 2004
Review led by Dong Zhu
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to extend thanks to Dr. E. V. Zaretsky of the NASA Glenn Research Center and Dr. C. S. Sharma of THK Co., Ltd., for serious discussions on this topic in completing this article. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Academic Frontier Project on Meiji University.
Notes
Presented at the ASME/STLE Tribology Conference in Long Beach, California October 24-27, 2004
Review led by Dong Zhu