Abstract
The development and propagation of fatigue cracks in real structures - with particular attention being paid to actual large-scale structures - have been thoroughly studied for the last four years in Czechoslovakia. In this respect, the presented paper deals with some specific fields of the mechanical structure design. First, the authors specify these fields from the point of view of fracture mechanics using a generalized probabilistic model to describe the state variations with time of a complex cracked structure. Secondly, the authors state the two main fields of interest based on the following generalized model:–that one of using the probabilistic description of the structure cracking behaviour to estimate the reliability that no crack will occur in the primary (fatigue-sensitive) substructure within a priori accepted time interval, i.e. to estimate the safe life of the structure,–that one of discussing some physical features of two crack propagation modes being paid interest to in this paper, namely the “plastic” and “stepwise pop-in” ones, thereby, synthetizing the probabilistic and fracture mechanics approaches into an useful engineering tool.
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