Xj. Xin et Er. Delosrios, INTERACTIVE EFFECT OF 2 COPLANAR CRACKS ON PLASTIC YIELDING AND COALESCENCE, Fatigue & fracture of engineering materials & structures, 17(9), 1994, pp. 1043-1056
A theoretical study of the conditions for coalescence of two fatigue c
racks in a multi-crack system is presented. As both cracks grow, the n
ear-side plastic zone sizes of the interacting cracks increase more ra
pidly than the off-side zone sizes which results in higher overall cra
ck propagation rates for an interacting crack growth system than the s
imple addition of individual crack growth rates. The use of a single c
rack growth model to predict failure in the presence of two or more cr
acks may therefore underestimate the interaction between cracks and le
ad to un-conservative predictions. Some of the theoretical predictions
were confirmed by published results of experimental measurements of c
rack interaction distances in multi-crack systems.