From Safe-Life to Damage-Tolerant Design: A Scientometric Mapping of Fatigue and Fracture Mechanics Research (2015–2025)

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-693-7_80How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Fatigue Analysis; Fracture Mechanics; Safe-Life Design; Damage-Tolerant Design; Structural Integrity; Scientometric Analysis

Abstract

The idea of fatigue and fracturing mechanics has always been primary in the safety and reliability of structural and mechanical systems, and over the past few years, there has been a paradigm shift between the conventional safe-life design and the damage-tolerant design. This paper intends to review and map the research area of fatigue and fracture mechanics between 2015 and 2025 with an aim of providing an insight into the emerging trends, global inputs and trend development. Scientometric analysis of 257 documents was done, retrieved out of 118 sources (journals, books and conference proceedings). The data sample indicated that the yearly increase rate was 15.15, and the 1,671 authors contributed to it in more than 25 countries, and this data reflects a high level of international cooperation (25.29%). China was the top publisher (31.3%), then United States (16.6% and United Kingdom (10.3%). Others of these leading institutions, including the University of Strathclyde and Universidade do Porto, each provided 28 publications, and key thematic clusters were around fracture mechanics, fatigue damage, crack propagation and finite element methods. The co-citation analysis, as well as network analysis of keywords, was used to identify the form of inter-linkages between experimental testing and computational modeling, which reinforced the shift towards a predictive and performance-based design. In general, the results contribute to the profound understanding of the state of research advancement, essential contributors, and intellectual frameworks with an emphasis on the worldwide impetus in forming strong damage-tolerant strategies in the engineering field of use.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - P. Sammaiah
AU  - K. Poongodi
AU  - Shirisha Balle
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/16
TI  - From Safe-Life to Damage-Tolerant Design: A Scientometric Mapping of Fatigue and Fracture Mechanics Research (2015–2025)
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for a Sustainable Future (ISSF 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 816
EP  - 828
SN  - 2589-4919
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-693-7_80
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-693-7_80
ID  - Sammaiah2026
ER  -