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

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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.

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