An Efficient Computational Procedure of Fatigue Crack Growth under Variable Amplitude Loading via XFEM

Abstract:

Modeling of fatigue crack growth (FCG) under variable amplitude (VA) loading has been a topic of intensive research for decades. This paper proposed an efficient numerical simulation procedure of the FCG process under VA loading via extended finite element method (XFEM). The procedure can describe the integrative effect of several factors (specimen thickness, stress ratio, Poisson’s ratio and so on) simultaneously with a general model. In order to improve the computation efficiency, the whole continua domain is divided into two parts by the level set functions and the global stiffness matrix is divided into four parts accordingly. Then, the inverse operation of global stiffness matrix can be calculated rapidly with the LDU decomposition and the equilibrium equation can be solved effectively. Several sets of fatigue test data in 2024-T351 and 7075-T6 aluminum alloys are used to verify the procedure, the predictions are in good agreement with the test data.

• Periodical: Advanced Materials Research (Volumes 538-541)
• Pages: 3012-3020
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.538-541.3012
• Online since: June 2012
• Authors: Jian Tao Liu, Tian Du
• Keywords: Fracture Mechanics, Level Set Method (LSM), Stress Intensity Factor (SIF), Stress Ratio, XFEM

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