An analysis of crack propagation and a plasticity-induced closure effect

Abstract

In the present paper, a few computational models for the crack growth analysis are improved. The improvements consist of including the effect of the plasticity-induced crack closure, i.e. the effective stress intensity factor is computed through the finite element method in order to account the effect of plasticity-induced crack closure on fatigue crack growth. Thus, corrective factors for the effect of the plasticity-induced crack closure are determined here. The improved models are noticed to provide a fairly good correlation with available experimental data. Furthermore, the calculated results show that the plasticity-induced crack closure has a significant effect on fatigue crack growth and flawed structure life.