Fatigue crack growth reliability analysis by stochastic boundary element method

In this paper, a stochastic dual boundary element formulation is presented for probabilistic analysis of fatigue crack growth. The method involves a direct differentiation approach for calculating boundary and fracture response derivatives with respect to random parameters. Total derivatives method is used to obtain the derivatives of fatigue parameters with respect to random parameters. First-Order Reliability Method (FORM) is applied to evaluate the most probable point (MPP). Opening mode fatigue crack growth problems are used as benchmarks to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Copyright © 2014 Tech Science Press.