A Structural Stress Approach Accounting for Notch Effects on Fatigue Propagation Life: Part I Theory

•A fatigue life evaluating method is developed to account for notch effects.•A novel analytical stress solution is proposed for sharp or blunt notch cases.•Notch effects of different notch angles and notch sharpness are researched.•Correlation between the analytical model and the actual fatigue behavior is studied.•New method is more applicable for correlating S-N data from different notch types.