Recent Developments on the Unified Fatigue Life Prediction Method Based on Fracture Mechanics and Its Applications

Safety analysis and prediction of a marine structure is of great concern by many stakeholders and the general public. In order to accurately predict the structural reliability of an in-use marine structure, one needs to calculate accurately the fatigue crack growth at any service time. This can only be possible by using fracture mechanics approach and the core of fracture-mechanics-based method is to establish an accurate crack growth rate model which must include all the influential factors of the same order of sensitivity index. In 2011, based on the analysis of various influencing factors, the authors put forward a unified fatigue life prediction (UFLP) method for marine structures. In the following ten years of research, some further improvements of this method have been made and the applications of this UFLP are carried out. In this paper, these progresses are reported and its underlying principles are further elaborated. Some basic test data used to determine model parameters are also provided.