An improved boundary element formulation for calculating stress intensity factors: Application to aerospace structures

Abstract

In order to compute stress intensity factors accurately, the standard boundary element method is modified to take explicit account of the singularity in the stresses at a crack-tip. The known expansion terms of the crack tip displacement and stress fields are subtracted to remove the numerical difficulties associated with the representation of a singular stress field at the crack-tip. Hence the accuracy of calculation is much improved, without appreciably increasing the amount of computation involved. Furthermore, the stress intensity factor is directly obtained as a part of a solution and no extrapolations are required. The improved formulation is applied to a configuration, which is representative of a part of the wing in a civil transport aeroplane. This configuration consists of a pair of circular cut-outs (supply ports) near to which smaller holes exist; these small holes are particularly susceptible to cracking.