- The service life of materials and components exposed to repeated mechanical loads is
limited, which is why the understanding of the damage evolution and estimating its fatigue life is of
high importance for its technical application. This paper shows how temperature and magnetic field
measurement methods can be used to describe the cyclic deformation behaviour of metallic materials
and to derive parameters from this, which are used in short-term methods to calculate the fatigue
life. Within the SteBLife (stepped-bar fatigue life) approach, only three to five fatigue tests with a
stepped fatigue specimen are required to determine a complete S–N or Woehler curve with scatter
bands for different failure probabilities. If only a trend S–N curve is required, the number of tests
can be reduced to a single fatigue test only. In the framework of this paper, these approaches will be
presented for normalised SAE 1045 (C45E) and quenched and tempered SAE 4140 (42CrMo4) steels.