A CRACK GROWTH MODEL BASED ON FATIGUE DAMAGE ACCUMULATION

A novel model for predicting the fatigue crack growth had been developed based on the concept of the fatigue damage accumulation. Fatigue crack growth was considered as a process of continuous crack nucleation. The crack tip failed to form a fresh crack while the accumulative fatigue damage reached the critical damage. A simplified model of the general crack growth model was proposed with the assumption that the damage zone can be divided into many different zones and each zone had the same crack growth rate. The model was applied to predict the crack growth of the compact specimen made of 16MnR steel under the constant amplitude loading. The predicted crack growth rate was in excellent agreement with the experimental observations.