Fatigue crack growth simulation of interacting multiple cracks in perforated plates with multiple holes using boundary cracklet method

In this study, the recently developed boundary cracklet method (BCM) is used to model the fatigue crack propagation (FCP) in complex geometries in two-dimensional domain. Several benchmark examples of FCP are analysed to show the effectiveness of BCM. Calculated stress intensity factors and crack paths show good agreement with reference studies. BCM is further used to simulate the multiple cracks interaction in a perforated plate with multiple holes having different cases of precracks emanating from edges of the plate and outer periphery of holes under fatigue loading. FCP is assumed to follow Paris–Erdogan law, and the maximum tangential stress criteria are used to predict the direction of propagation in each step. Moreover, to describe the computational efficiency of a numerical method in fatigue problems, a new parameter is introduced: Yavuz's fatigue computational efficiency factor (Y_CF), which is the number of computed million cycles per hour (CPU time).