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At least according to the article, the main failure mode is fatiguing, so I’m not sure lube would help with that, unless the corrosion is really bad. Most materials have a finite amount of cycles in them (although I’m a bit skeptical of the authors 7 year estimate…it seems low to me)

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Roughly 30k cycles is typical. You can certainly design a spring to have infinite life. But it requires reducing average deflection, aka more spring with less deflection per turn.

The article claims a 10k cycle limit for common-grade torsion springs (but again, I'm skeptical). You can design a spring to have infinite life. Still, you must constrain yourself to specific materials (steel and titanium being the most common) because most materials don't have an infinite life on an S-N curve.

Doesn't the rubbing of the coils against each other contribute to fatigue?

Yes, it does.

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