A pseudo-spring based SPH framework for studying fatigue crack propagation

Abstract

The existing smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) approaches for propagating fatigue cracks involve either the deletion of the crack front particle or stopping all its interactions in the total Lagrangian form. Here, we adopt the pseudo-spring-based Eulerian form of SPH to model mode-I fatigue crack propagation. For modeling fatigue crack growth, only the interactions between the crack front particle and its neighbors, which display the largest axial stresses in the connected pseudo-springs, are stopped. We show that our framework can determine accurately the mode-I stress intensity factors (SIFs) and capture both the fatigue crack path and the fatigue life of different specimens.