Designing short fibers reinforced thermoplastics (SFRP) components is now a major concern for the automotive industry. This task is difficult because of the numerous factors affecting the fatigue lifetime coupled to long fatigue campaigns (usually a month for a given experimental condition).The objective of this thesis is to apply a heat built-up protocol on a SFRP used for structural automotive applications (PA66GF50, a polyamide filled with 50% of glass fiber in mass) to predict quickly the fatigue properties from temperature measurements. A heat build-up protocol developed for metallic materials has been used to speed up the fatigue characterization of PA66GF50. The life time estimation given by a first rough analysis is compared successfully to the fatigue curve obtained from a classical campaign. To understand what is caught from the thermal measurements, the evolution of the microstructure throughout the heat build-up test was investigated by X-ray micro-tomography and SEM and compared to the evolution of the mechanical features. In order to provide a relation between the full heat build-up curve and the Wohler curve, the dissipated energy is then evaluated from the thermal measurements and the parameters of an energetic fatigue criterion are identified from the results obtained from one single sample. The fatigue curve predicted from the heat build-up curve and obtained in 2 days, is compared to the one obtained from a classical fatigue campaign and the agreement is very good. The energy based criterion as well as the identification of the dissipation sources from the temperature measurements are finally challenged by an experimental campaign achieved on a sample with a different geometry and different water content. Dissipated energy curve seems unified results. Finally, the method is applied to the study of the lifetime of structures.
