ABSTRACT
In most instances, the residual fatigue life of a cracked structural element is characterised by the crack growth rate that may be correlated to the cyclic change in the crack tip stress intensity factor. The effects of the stress field, the crack size and shape, and the structural geometry are related to the stress intensity factor in a systematic manner. This parameter may be evaluated from stress analysis of the body. This chapter describes the evaluation of stress intensity factors for arbitrary cracked three-dimensional bodies using the boundary element method (BEM). The BEM is adopted since it is well known to be suitable for the analysis of rapidly varying stress fields associated with fracture mechanics. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate some of the basic modelling problems associated with three-dimensional fracture mechanics analysis and to provide numerical results for complex cracked bodies.
