Fatigue crack growth analysis of assembled plate structures with dual boundary element method

In this paper the dual boundary element method for modeling fatigue crack growth of through-cracks in assembled plate structures is presented. A multi-region Boundary Element formulation is implemented to model the assembly, while the dual boundary element method is applied to extract the Stress Intensity Factors. The approach adopted to simulate the crack propagations is the incremental crack extensions in which each new crack extension is modelled with new boundary elements and the direction is calculated by means of the maximum principal stress criterion. The size of the increment can be chosen arbitrarily, since it depends only on the number of load cycles to which the structure is subject.