Fatigue crack growth analysis of a homogeneous plate in the presence of multiple defects using extended isogeometric analysis

In this work, extended Isogeometric analysis (XIGA) is successfully extended to evaluate the fatigue life of a homogenous finite plate in the presence of multiple defects (cracks, holes and inclusions) under cyclic loading condition. In isogeometric analysis, same basis functions, i.e. non uniform rational B-splines are used for defining the geometry and solution. In XIGA, the crack faces are modeled by discontinuous Heaviside jump functions, whereas the singularity in stress field at the crack tip is modeled by crack tip enrichment functions. The modeling of holes and inclusions is performed by jump function and distance function, respectively. These simulations show that the defects/discontinuities, distributed near to the main crack, have significant effect on the SIF values, whereas the defects/discontinuities away from the main crack have got very small effect on the SIFs.