PROGRESS IN SMALL SAMPLE EXPERIMENTS FOR FATIGUE LIFE ANALYSIS

Due to the limit of time and expense, small samples are always used in fatigue experiments of aeronautic structures. Therecent studies on fatigue life of smallsample experiments based on the historical data are reviewed in this paper.The definition of small sample is given and the methods developed in therecent decade are classified and discussed in cluding distribution determination,parameters estimation and goodness-of-fit test according to the purposes ofthe researches. Some possible and prospective future researchdirections are discussed.