Prediction of Fracture and Fatigue Damage in Engineering Structures

This paper presents a method of failure analysis based on the theory of damage mechanics to predict fracture and fatigue failure in engineering structures. Two damage surfaces, the fatigue damage surface and the plastic damage surface, are firstly introduced to characterize material degradation. Then the damage evolution equations are provided. A failure criterion is proposed using the concept of damage accumulation. The model is incorporated into a commercial finite element program ABAQUS, which is used to conduct failure analyses in components made of AL 2024-T3 under both monotonic loading and cyclic loading.