Probabilistic Analysis of the Fatigue Crack Growth Based on the Application of the Monte-Carlo Method to Unigrow Model

This paper presents results obtained from the combination of the UniGrow fatigue crack growth model with Monte-Carlo simulation method. Four sets of available statistical fatigue crack growth data were used for the analysis. The material resistance to the fatigue crack propagation was modelled as a random input parameter while the geometry and loading conditions were kept deterministic. The measure of comparison was chosen to be the distribution of the number of cycles required to propagate the crack from a certain initial to the desired deterministic size. The difference between the “within specimen” and “from specimen to specimen” variability is assessed. Influence of the former on fatigue crack growth predictions is demonstrated to be negligible. It is shown that the probability distributions obtained from the numerical analysis closely resemble distributions obtained from the available experimental data.

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