Estimating probabilistic fatigue of Nitinol with scarce samples

•A new approach is proposed to estimate Fatigue life quantiles with scarce samples.•The approach is free from statistical distribution assumption.•Bootstrap is used to obtain the variation associated with the quantile estimates.•Approach demonstrated on data from literature.•Probabilistic fatigue for austenitic Nitinol is established.

Current work estimates probabilistic fatigue life efficiently with scarce samples. The underlying idea of the estimation is to approximate the cumulative distribution function of the fatigue life in a transformed space using a third order polynomial subject to monotonicity constraint. The variations associated with the estimated quantiles are quantified using bootstrap. The proposed approach is validated on a data obtained from literature. It is observed that the life quantiles with reasonable accuracy can be estimated even with 10 samples. Finally, the probabilistic fatigue of Nitinol in austenitic condition is obtained with limited experiments.