Fracture Mechanics Methodologies for Structural Integrity Assessments and Fatigue Life Predictions under Multi-axial Non-proportional Loading

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Safe operations of high-performance structural components such as those in nuclear pressure vessel, gas pipeline, offshore and aircraft industries are of significant practical interest. Failures of any of those components are major concerns since they can result in injury to the public, damage to the environment and high repair costs. Structural integrity assessments and fatigue life predictions aimed at quantifying the impact of defects in those components play a key role in ensuring the safe service of those high-performance structures. Current fracture-mechanics based procedures use results of laboratory tests on small-scale specimens to correlate and predict the response of full scale structural components. Significant developments in constraint-based fracture mechanics have taken place in recent years to ensure reliable transferability of properties obtained from laboratory tests to the full scale components. In those developments, the differences between the crack tip triaxial stress states (so-called “constraint”) in test specimens and full scale components was quantified.