Curvilinear fatigue crack growth simulation and validation under constant amplitude and overload loadings

A concurrent simulation and experimental validation for curvilinear fatigue crack growth (FCG) analysis under both constant amplitude and overload spectrums is proposed in this paper. The simulation methodology is based on a small time-scale fatigue crack growth model and the extended finite element method (XFEM) to calculate the stress intensity factor solution of an arbitrary curvilinear crack. Parametric studies are used to determine the algorithm parameters in the numerical fatigue crack growth simulation. Following this, experimental testing on modified compact specimens is performed under both constant amplitude and overload loadings for model validation. Experimentally measured crack growth orientations and lengths are compared with numerical simulations. Both the experimental and simulation results show the overload retardation behavior for curvilinear cracks under overload loadings. The investigated periodic overload loading has no significant impact on the crack growth orientations. Several conclusions and areas of future work are identified based on the proposed numerical and experimental investigations.