Numerical simulation of fatigue crack growth in pressurized shells

This paper presents a procedure for numerical simulation of fatigue crack growth in pressurized cylindrical and spherical shells using the dual boundary element method. The simulations are performed using an incremental crack growth procedure, where stress intensity factors, fatigue life cycles and crack growth directions are calculated for every increment of the growth. The results obtained in this work are shown to be in good agreement with experimental results. Some examples are presented to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method.