A global model reduction approach for 3D fatigue crack growth with confined plasticity

It has been known for decades that fatigue crack propagation in elastic-plastic media is very sensitive to load history since the nonlinear behavior of the material can have a great influence on propagation rates. However, raw computations of millions of nonlinear fatigue cycles on tridimensional structures would lead to prohibitive calculation times. In this respect, we propose a global model reduction strategy, mixing both the a posteriori and a priori approaches in order to drastically decrease the computational cost of these types of problems. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.