Fatigue paths simulation of a center slant crack in cracked brazilian disk by BEM

This paper presents a prediction model for fatigue growthof multiple crack tips in a plane elastic plate. It mainly involves atheoretical model and a numerical method to investigate the fatigue growthof multiple crack tips under mixed-mode loading. The numerical method wasadopted with a hybrid displacement discontinuity method (HDDM), a kind ofboundary element method. With the boundary element method, a crack growthproblem of multiple crack tips can be solved in a single-region formulation.In the numerical simulation, crack extension is conveniently modeled byadding new boundary elements on the incremental crack extension to theprevious crack boundaries. Menwhile, the element characters of some relatedelements will be adjusted. As an example, the present numerical approach isused to simulate the fatigue growth of a center slant cracked circular disk.The numerical results illustrate the validation of the prediction model andreveal the geometry effect of the cracked circular disk on the fatiguegrowth.