Modeling and Numerical Simulation of Fatigue Crack Growth in Cracked Specimens Containing Material Discontinuities.

In this paper, the extended finite element method has been used to evaluate the fatigue life of cracked specimens in presence of bi-material interfaces. The standard finite element approximation is modified by adding appropriate enrichment functions in order to take into account the effect of these discontinuities present in the domain. The level set method is used to track different discontinuities in the domain. The stress intensity factors are calculated by the interaction integral approach. Finally, several numerical problems are presented to demonstrate the effect of these bi-material interfaces on fatigue crack growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]