Development of probabilistic fracture mechanics method for fatigue life prediction based on EIFS concept

A problem with fracture mechanics (FM) based fatigue analysis is that reliable information on initial crack/flaw size is often unavailable. Also, FM method cannot be applied directly to welded joints with relatively small initial flaws and long crack initiation life. This paper proposes a novel probabilistic FM method based on the equivalent initial flaw size (EIFS) concept. The initial crack size is substituted with EIFS to take both the crack initiation and propagation life into account. Three methods are tested to obtain mean value of EIFS: calibrating to S-N curve, Kitagawa-Takahashi (KT) diagram and fitting to test data. The obtained EIFSs are evaluated by comparing the predicted fatigue lives and crack evolutions with S-N curve and test crack evolution data. The suggested procedure is to derive the mean value of EIFS from S-N curve and the coefficient of variation from KT diagram.

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