Abstract
Highly precise evaluations of the stress intensity factor are necessary for the prediction of growth and instable fractures of the cracks in mechanical structural components. Generally, crack shape that exists in three-dimensional mechanical structural components can often be approximated as an elliptical crack or part of an elliptical crack. However, it is difficult for a highly precise stress intensity factor to be obtained if the element decomposition is not made fine in a singular vicinity, such as a crack leading edge, in general numerical methods for analysis, such as the finite element method or the boundary element method. In light of this, we used the VNA solution Finite Element Alternating Method (VNA-FEAM). The major advantage of the VNA-FEAM is that, in case of the health diagnostics of a mechanical structure under boundary conditions of high -dimensional optional external traction, etc., without any direct modeling of the crack shape for single or multiple surface or embedded cracks, the stress intensity factor along the front of the cracks are evaluated with high precision and by the highly efficiency. In this study, we evaluated the degree of interacting between surface cracks in mechanical structural components by using this numerical analysis.
