Application of the Enhanced Reference Stress Method to Simplified Inelastic J-integral Evaluation using Open Source CAE

Abstract

Although fatigue crack propagation in low cycle fatigue loading can be evaluated by using fatigue J-integral ranges, the elastic-plastic analysis of cracked component needed to estimate those parameters is usually costly and laborsome. The enhanced reference stress method can be employed in estimating elastic-plastic J-integral from stress intensity factor and limit load solutions in order to save costs and labor. However, it has limitations on the shape of the crack. In the study that designed to improve usability by creating a database, open source CAE (Salome-Meca, code_aster, ver. 2018) was used to get stress intensity factor and other necessary solutions such as corrections factor，and the commercial software CAE (Mentat, MSC. Marc, ver. 2019) was used to compared with the results. On the basis of verifying the elastic-plastic analysis results, these solutions were applied to the enhanced reference stress method. In addition, Python script that saves labor was used to perform FEA effectively.