Crack growth analysis of shear deformable plate under bending and tension

This paper presents a method for fatigue crack growth path prediction by using the Displacement Discontinuity Method (DDM) in shear deformable plate bending and tension. A novel crack extension segment technique is introduced to model crack growth path and the stress intensity factors at the crack tip are captured using the equivalent stress technique. All stress intensity factors (three for bending and two for in-plane loads) are evaluated accurately using the equivalent stress algorithm. The Paris law and the maximum principal stress criterion are adopted to define the growth rate and direction of the fatigue crack growth, respectively. The constant crack length increment with tangential approach is utilized in all numerical examples. Validations are demonstrated with ABAQUS for the numerical examples with an edge crack under combination of out-of-plane plate bending and in-plane tensile loads.