Fatigue growth modeling of cracks emanating from a circular hole in infinite plate

This paper presents a numerical approach of fatigue growth analysis of cracks emanating from a hole in infinite elastic plate subjected to remote loads. It involves a generation of Bueckner’s principle and a hybrid displacement discontinuity method (a boundary element method) proposed recently by the senior author of the paper. Because of an intrinsic feature of the boundary element method, a general crack growth problem can be solved in a single region formulation. In the numerical simulation, for each increment of crack extension, remeshing of existing boundaries is not necessary. Crack extension is modeled conveniently by adding new boundary elements on the incremental crack extension to the previous crack boundaries. As an example, fatigue growth process of an inclined crack in an infinite plate under uniaxial cycle load is modeled to illustrate the effectiveness of the numerical approach. In addition, fatigue growth of cracks emanating from a circular hole in infinite elastic plate subjected to remote loads is investigated by using the numerical approach. Many numerical results are given