Nowadays it is wellknown that an important part of the fatigue life ti
me, usually differenciated in crack initiation and crack growth, is of
ten controlled by fatigue crack growth of cracks in notches. An elasti
c-plastic on the J-integral based crack growth model considering the c
rack opening and closure phenomenon will be described to determine cra
ck growth of cracks in notches between crack initiation and failure. E
xperimental results and finite element analysis were used to verify th
e developed model.