Infamous Failures of Fatigue If you’ve studied structural
mechanics you’re probably familiar with stories of planes
falling out of the sky due to fatigue (no one wants to be the
engineer who designed an airplane that crashed…). Jimmy Stewart
made a famous movie about that, but different from the usual
horror stories of fatigue is the accident in 1919 of a storage
tank that burst in Boston, spilling molasses onto the streets at
35 mph (56 km/h). The Boston Molasses Disaster, as it’s referred
to, is another one of many infamous failures of fatigue. What is
Fatigue? Before we go into the infamous failures of fatigue,
let’s come to terms with what the phenomenon is. Guest author
and Certified Consultant, Kyle Koppenhoefer of AltaSim, explains
it well in his blog post “Fatigue — When Cyclic Stress Produces
Fractures“. Basically, fatigue is structural damage accumulated
over many cycles of applied stress. “Many” in this case refers
to thousands (strain-based; low-cycle) or millions (stress-
based; high-cycle) of cyc