Fatigue is one of the most important mechanical properties of materials, characterizing a mechanical process of material degradation under cyclic loading. Fatigue performance plays a crucial role for the applications in aerospace, nuclear energy and microelectronics industries. Recent decades have witnessed explosive growth of research publications on material fatigue, the data reported in which are expected to advance the scientific knowledge and the development of engineering materials. However, fatigue studies are very time and economically costly, and the quality of reported fatigue data is often insufficient for practical design if the materials are not covered by commercial or government specifications. Normalizing the content and formats of scientific reporting on fatigue data is highly desired, requiring joint efforts from researchers, journal publishers and funding agencies. Here we discuss the demands, challenges and feasibility of the ways to maximize the value of open fatigue data.

To take full advantage of this plentiful information, recent efforts were made to construct and analyse the fatigue data collected from literature^3,4,5,6. However, an important and unexpected finding from these studies is that a large portion of the research reported in journal articles was carried out without referring to the standards of specimen preparation and testing (Fig. 1b). This issue is especially noticeable in studies of alloys that have attracted intense interest in recent years^3,4,6. For additively manufactured alloys such as the well-known Ti-6Al-4V, IN718 and 316L, only 40% of the reported studies are adapted to the testing standards (for example, ASTM E466 released by the American Society for Testing and Materials, and ISO 1143 released by the International Organization for Standardization), possibly due to the time, scope and cost constraints or the technological limitation in sample preparation and experimental setup. Moreover, the fill rates of specimen preparation and fatigue testing information are commonly not high enough to efficiently reuse the published data. Although the non-standard tests may offer key insights into the fatigue performance of these alloys, the scientific and technological knowledge can only be digested if the details are made accessible.

疲劳是材料最重要的机械性能之一，表征了循环载荷下材料降解的机械过程。疲劳性能对于航空航天、核能和微电子行业的应用起着至关重要的作用。近几十年来，有关材料疲劳的研究出版物呈爆炸式增长，其中报告的数据有望推动科学知识和工程材料的发展。然而，疲劳研究非常耗时且经济成本高昂，并且如果商业或政府规范未涵盖材料，则报告的疲劳数据的质量通常不足以满足实际设计的需要。非常需要规范疲劳数据科学报告的内容和格式，这需要研究人员、期刊出版商和资助机构的共同努力。在这里，我们讨论最大化开放疲劳数据价值的需求、挑战和可行性。

为了充分利用这些丰富的信息，最近人们努力构建和分析从文献 ^3,4,5,6 中收集的疲劳数据。然而，这些研究的一个重要且意想不到的发现是，期刊文章中报道的很大一部分研究是在没有参考标本制备和测试标准的情况下进行的（图1b）。这个问题在近年来引起强烈兴趣的合金研究中尤其引人注目 ^3,4,6 。对于增材制造的合金，如众所周知的 Ti-6Al-4V、IN718 和 316L，只有 40% 的报道研究符合测试标准（例如，美国测试与材料协会发布的 ASTM E466，以及ISO 1143 由国际标准化组织发布），可能是由于时间、范围和成本限制或样品制备和实验设置的技术限制。此外，样本制备和疲劳测试信息的填充率通常不够高，无法有效地重复使用已发布的数据。尽管非标准测试可以提供有关这些合金疲劳性能的重要见解，但只有了解详细信息才能消化科学和技术知识。