Predicting fatigue life of multi-defect materials using the fracture mechanics-based physics-informed neural network framework

•The physics-informed neural network was developed to predict the fatigue life of multi-defect materials.•The M−integral fatigue model effectively guides the gradient descent of predictive errors for the fatigue life in PINN.•The presented prediction model can accurately forecast the lifetime of multi-defect materials using limited fatigue data. To address the limitations of traditional methods (such as the S-N curves and Paris’s law) in evaluating the fatigue life of multi-defect materials, this study developed a fracture mechanics-based physics-informed neural network (PINN) to predict the lifetime of multi-defect materials using cyclic loading (Δσ) and the equivalent damage area (AD). Influences of multiple defects were unified characterized through the equivalent damage area, which was calculated based on the M−integral fatigue model. This model reflects the energy evolution of multi-defect fatigue damage. By embedding the prior knowledge of fracture mechanics derived from the M−integral fatigue model into the loss function of PINN, crucial physical information was captured during the training progress, enhancing the interpretability of the neural network. By integrating the advantage of the M−integral fatigue model in characterizing the fatigue performance of multi-defect materials and the nonlinear fitting ability of neural networks, the proposed approach effectively improves the generalization ability and predictive accuracy of limited fatigue data. The presented PINN models accurately forecast the fatigue life of multi-defect materials, with a squared correlation coefficient (R2) exceeding 0.9. The presented methodological framework addresses the existing gap in methods for evaluating the fatigue performance of multi-defect materials and reliance on fatigue testing.