Elasto-plastic crack growth analysis under cyclic torsional loadings with crack surfaces

Abstract

Crack growth under the elastic-plastic fracture is an important issue of the structural integrity, because seismic wave causes low cycle fatigue in the engineering structure. We developed automated FEM analysis framework for elastic-plastic crack growth simulation. The framework consists of 4 major modules. In this work, we employ crack opening angle (COA) and displacement (COD) which are the angle between crack surfaces and the displacement vector to be defined near the crack tip. The present work is applied to the cyclic loading analysis of a pipe with a single notch. The work shows automated mesh generation capability and fracture mechanics parameters to evaluate crack growth criterion.