Probabilistic life assessment on fatigue crack growth in mixed-mode by coupling of Kriging model and finite element analysis

It is necessary to manage the fatigue crack growth (FCG) of engineering structures for ensuring an appropriate reliability level over the entire operational lifetime. This paper deals with an approach to assess the probabilistic life of mixed-mode FCG by coupling of finite element analysis and Kriging-based reliability methods. A simulation program (FCG-System) is developed to simulate the fatigue crack path and to compute the corresponding fatigue life. Kriging-based Monte Carlo simulation method is used to solve fatigue reliability problem with uncertain parameters. Numerical applications dealing with FCG are presented to illustrate the numerical efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approach. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.