Peridynamic Simulation of Fatigue Crack Growth Behaviour with the Effect of Microstructure

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influences of microstructures on crack growth behaviour in 2324-T39 aluminum alloy based on peridynamic(PD) theory. The microelastic bond-based peridynamic constitutive is modified as microplastic to describe the plasticity of aluminum alloys. A new method to establish polycrystalline models based on metallographs is adopted, and grains are reflected in simulations by setting transgranular and intergranular pairwise force in the corresponding bonds. Two kinds of microstructures are modeled according to metallographs, and a special kind of crack branch resulted from the link-up of the secondary crack with the main crack and the growth of the branched crack is successfully captured. The PD simulations reveal that microstructure orientation characteristics have an impact on crack propagation paths and crack growth modes, and it is easier for the secondary-crack resulted macroscopic crack branching to appear if grain boundaries locate not too close to the leading crack tip but within the crack tip plastic zone. The numerical results are verified by experiments and fractographic analysis