Data-driven approach to predict the fatigue properties of ferrous metal materials using the cGAN and machine-learning algorithms

The stress-life curve (S–N) and low-cycle strain-life curve (E–N) are the two primary representations used to characterize the fatigue behavior of a material. These material fatigue curves are essential for structural fatigue analysis. However, conducting material fatigue tests is expensive and time-intensive. To address the challenge of data limitations on ferrous metal materials, we propose a novel method that utilizes the Random Forest Algorithm and transfer learning to predict the S–N and E–N curves of ferrous materials. In addition, a data-augmentation framework is introduced using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) to overcome data deficiencies. By incorporating the cGAN-generated data, the accuracy (R²) of the Random Forest Algorithm-trained model is improved by 0.3–0.6. It is proven that the cGAN can significantly enhance the prediction accuracy of the machine-learning model and balance the cost of obtaining fatigue data from the experiment.