Fatigue Quick Start Guide > Rainflow Cycle Counting > Concluding Remarks
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Concluding Remarks
This exercise introduced you to rainflow cycle counting, damage summation, mean stress effects, and the probabilistic nature of fatigue by using a randomly varying load on our simple keyhole model. Though this example still did not help us identify critical locations since we already knew where failure would occur, it did start to show the power of MSC Fatigue by being able to handle complex time signals and to make compensation for parameters that may effect the fatigue life, something that would be a daunting task to do by hand.
The next exercise will introduce the concept of a component S-N curve.
Quit from Pre & Post or MSC Patran when you are through with this exercise.
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Note:  
MSC Fatigue does not take into account the frequency (speed at which cycles are experienced) or the sequence (when a particular cycle is experienced relative to other cycles) of cycles from a given signal. Rainflow cycle counting simply counts the number of cycles and determines their range and mean. Frequency and sequence can have an influence on the fatigue life but is a third or fourth order effect on life prediction in most cases. MSC Fatigue does provide you with certain fatigue analysis utilities to determine if these influences are important after the initial analysis using the MSC MSC Fatigue module MTCD (for time correlated damage).