Constraint Effects in 3-D Fatigue Crack Closure

Mesh sensitivity effects on fatigue crack growth by crack-tip blunting and re-sharpening

“…It has been found that the crack-tip opening displacement, CTOD, shows a transient behaviour, such that for many cycles initially there is no crack closure at the tip when the minimum load is reached in each cycle, but subsequently the growth pattern develops towards a steady-state, where closure occurs in each cycle. This adds to the understanding obtained in earlier analyses of the possibility of crack closure during fatigue crack growth (Fleck and Newman, 1988;Roychowdhury and Dodds, 2002). The remeshing technique has subsequently been used to study the effect of overloads and the effect of compressive underloads (Tvergaard, 2005(Tvergaard, , 2006.…”