Abstract
In order to evaluate fatigue crack growth behavior of the FSW plate, the crack opening stress of the FSW panel and the base plate are calculated by the elasto-plastic FEM. The obtained crack opening stress of the base material is comparable to the experimental result. And the calculated crack opening stress of FSW panel indicates that the crack opening stress becomes minimum when the crack tip is inside the weld line and it goes close to that of the base material when the tip is far from the weld line. The calculated da/dN-ΔK curves for the FSW plate also well coincide with the experimental ones. These results indicate that the fatigue crack growth behavior of the FSW specimen is able to be simulated by the numerical crack opening stress in this case.
