Abstract
A problem with fracture mechanics (FM) based fatigue analysis is that reliable information on initial crack/flaw size is often hard to obtain. Also, FM method can’t 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 curves, 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 curves and test crack evolution data. The suggested procedure is to derive the mean value of EIFS from S-N curves and the coefficient of variation from KT diagram.
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