Interaction of three parallel cracks in rectangular plate under cyclic loads

This paper presents a numerical approach for modeling the interaction between multiple cracks in a rectangular plate under cyclic loads. It involves the formulation of fatigue growth of multiple crack tips under mixed-mode loading and an extension of a hybrid displacement discontinuity method (a boundary element method) to fatigue crack growth analyses. Because of an intrinsic feature of the boundary element method, a general growth problem of multiple cracks can be solved in a single-region formulation. In the numerical simulation, remeshing of existing boundaries is not necessary for each increment of crack extension. Crack extension is conveniently modeled by adding new boundary elements on the incremental crack extension to the previous crack boundaries. As an example, the numerical approach is used to analyze the fatigue growth of three parallel cracks in a rectangular plate. The numerical results illustrate the validation of the numerical approach and can reveal the effect of the geometry of the cracked plate on the fatigue growth.