Fatigue degradation strategies to simulate crack propagation using peridynamic based computational methods

Abstract The aim of this paper is to develop new computational tools to study fatigue crack propagation in structural materials. In particular we compare the performance of different degradation strategies to study fatigue crack propagation phenomena adopting peridynamic based computational methods. Three fatigue degradation laws are proposed. Two of them are original. Initially a cylinder model is used to compare the computational performance of the three fatigue laws and to study their robustness with respect to variations of discretization parameters. Then the fatigue degradation strategies are implemented in a peridynamic framework for fatigue crack propagation analyses. Both cylinder model and peridynamic simulations show that the third proposed degradation law is unique in its combination of high accuracy, high stability and low computational cost.