Elastic crack interaction limit of two interacting edge cracks in finite body

Abstract

In certain range of crack interval ratio and crack width ratio, the neighboring cracks will affect the changes of stress field interaction around the crack tip, thus induced significant changes in stress intensity factor. In this study, the elastic crack interaction limit for finite cracked body was simulated using global and local model approach. The interacted stress intensity factor variation is evaluated using direct method and strain energy release based using finite element analysis. It was shown that crack interval ratio and crack width ratio were both important parameters to determine the crack interaction limit. The determined crack interaction limit also has a good agreement with published results from open literature.