A boundary element modeling of fatigue crack growth in a plane elastic plate

This paper presents an extension of a boundary element method to fatigue growth analysis of mixed-mode cracked plane elastic bodies. The method consists of the non-singular displacement discontinuity element presented by Crouch and Starfield and the crack-tip displacement discontinuity element due to the author. In the boundary element implementation the left or the right crack-tip element is placed locally at the corresponding left or right crack tip on top of non-singular displacement discontinuity elements that cover the entire crack surface and the other boundaries. Crack growth is simulated with an incremental crack extension analysis based on the modified maximum strain energy density criterion. In numerical simulation, for each increment of crack extension, remeshing of existing boundaries is not required because of an intrinsic feature of the boundary element method. Crack growth is simulated by adding new boundary elements on the incremental crack extension to the previous crack boundaries. At the same time, the element characters of some related elements are adjusted according to the manner in which the boundary element method is implemented. Some numerical results of fatigue growth in a plane elastic plate with a center-inclined crack under uniaxial cyclic loading are given.