A global model reduction approach for fatigue crack growth with

confined plasticity
F. Galland1, A. Gravouil1, M. Rochette2, S. Perrin2,
1
INSA de Lyon, Villeurbanne, France;
2
ANSYS France S.A.S, Villeurbanne, France;
E-mail: florent.galland@insa-lyon.fr

It is known since decades that fatigue crack propagation in elastic-plastic media is very
sensitive to load history since the non-linear behavior of the material can have a great
influence on propagation rates [1, 2]. However, raw computations of millions of non-
linear fatigue cycles on tri-dimensional realistic structures would lead to prohibitive
calculation times. In this respect, we propose here a mixed a priori – a posteriori model
reduction approach in order to drastically decrease the computational cost of this type of
problems.
First, the small scale yielding hypothesis is assumed, and an a posteriori model reduction
of the plastic behavior of the cracked structure is performed. Using an elastic-plastic
behavior as realistic as possible, a crack solicited in mode 1 is simulated, and the
resulting displacement field is projected on a suitable reduced basis. Pommier et al.
remarked that a basis of dimension 2 is sufficient to describe accurately the elastic-plastic
displacement field of a steady crack: one vector for the elastic part and another one for
the plastic part of the field [3]. Moreover, they managed to build constitutive laws for the
evolutions of the corresponding variables. Thus, the parameters of this evolution laws are
numerically identified in a first step and after that, this a posteriori model reduction can
be applied to any two or tri-dimensional test-case, handling efficiently the plastic
behavior of the structure. At this point, even if the non-linear computations are avoided,
describing realistic variable amplitude loadings over millions of load steps requires
millions of linear elastic computations to provide the stress intensity factors to this
reduced model. An additional a priori model reduction approach is then used to
accelerate even more the time to solution of the whole problem [4]. This a priori
approach consists in building incrementally and without any previous calculations a
reduced basis specific to the considered test-case, by extracting information from the
evolving displacement field of the structure. Then the displacement solutions of the
updated crack geometries are sought as linear combinations of those few basis vectors.
A good indicator of the minimal dimension of such a reduced basis for a given test-case
is to simulate some propagation steps, to store the resulting displacement vectors, and
then to perform a singular value decomposition on this set of vectors. The number of
significant singular values gives an idea of the necessary number of vectors to build a
good basis. Such an analysis is presented in figure 1, on a semi-elliptical crack in 3D. The
results show that 140 propagation steps can be efficiently described by only 5 vectors.

1
 Figure 1. Normalized singular values of a set of 140 displacement solution vectors of a
crack propagation problem.

REFERENCES

[1] W. Elber, The significance of crack closure, ASTM STP 486 :230–242, 1971

[2] O. Wheeler, Spectrum load and crack growth, J. Basic Engng. Trans. ASME,
4:181–186, 1972

[3] R. Hamam, S. Pommier, and F. Bumbieler, Variable amplitude fatigue crack

growth, experimental results and modeling, International Journal of Fatigue,
29(9-11) :1634–1646, 2007

[4] D. Ryckelynck, F. Chinesta, E. Cueto, and A. Ammar, On the a priori model

reduction: Overview and recent developments, Archives of Computational
Methods in Engineering, 13(1):91–128, 2006