Fatigue crack growth analysis by an enriched meshless method

The aim of this paper is to analyze the fatigue growth of cracks under cyclic loading conditions. The propagation is modeled by successive linear extensions, which are determined by the stress intensity factors (SIFs) obtained after a linear elastic analysis. We use a meshless method to perform the successive analyses. A new contribution of this paper is that we add to the fixed set of nodes three nodes with a special weight function at each crack tip. This is done in order to accurately catch the stress singularity at these tips. We verify on simple problems that the enriched method gives more accurate SIFs than the classic method. Then, we apply it to a fatigue crack growth problem.