Thermo-mechanical crack propagation in aircraft engine vane by coupled FEM–DBEM approach

New generation jet engines are subject to severe reduced fuel consumption requirements. This usually leads to thin components in which damage issues such as thermo-mechanical fatigue, creep and crack propagation can be quite important. The combination of mechanical and thermal stresses usually leads to mixed-mode loading. Consequently, a suitable crack propagation tool must be able to predict mixed-mode crack propagation of arbitrarily curved cracks in three-dimensional space. To tackle this problem a procedure has been developed based on a combined FEM (finite element method) – DBEM (dual boundary element method) approach. Starting from a three-dimensional FEM mesh for the uncracked structure a subdomain is identified, in which crack initiation and propagation are simulated by DBEM. Such a subdomain is extracted from the FEM domain and imported, together with its boundary conditions (calculated by a previous thermal-stress FEM analysis), in a DBEM environment, where a linear elastic multiple crack growth analysis is performed. Once the crack propagation direction is determined a new crack increment can be calculated and, for the new crack front, the procedure can be repeated until failure. The proposed procedure also allows the consideration of the spectrum effects and creep effects: both conditions determine residual stresses that the crack will encounters during its propagation. The procedure has been tested on a gas turbine vane, getting sound results, and can be made fully automatic, thanks to in house made routines needed to facilitate the data exchange between the two adopted codes.