Increasing requirements made to devices and components in the fields of aviation and astronautics, military engineering, and other fields of engineering require the use of materials optimized with regard to reliability and performance.

Increasing requirements made to devices and components in the fields of aviation and astronautics, military engineering, and other fields of engineering require the use of materials optimized with regard to reliability and performance. To design structures in a way which is optimal both technically and economically there should be safe knowledge about their load spectrum in real life. However, this is difficult in most cases because there are uncertainties about the expected operating conditions. This gap in knowledge can be closed to a very large extent by systematic failure analysis, particularly statements about material behaviour in case of limit loads.