Fatigue crack propagation studies based on the plastic component of the CTOD evaluated from Digital Image Correlation data

This work presents a new approach based on the Crack Tip Opening Displacement (CTOD) for studying the fatigue crack growth. The plastic component of the CTOD is employed for predicting the crack propagation on austenitic stainless steel. This is in contrast to Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics analysis based on the Stress Intensity Factor (SIF) (Ewalds and Wanhill 1984). The current method is also valid beyond Small Scale Yielding (Antunes et al. 2016)(Antunes et al. 2017a)(Borges et al. 2020) as it incorporates naturally the plasticity effects taking place at the crack tip (Lopez-Crespo et al. 2018). The approach is based on post-processing the full-field displacement information generated by Digital Image Correlation technique (Chernyatin et al. 2018). Such technique is used to monitor the crack advance throughout the test (Cruces et al. 2020). The post-processing procedure employed for extracting the plastic component of the CTOD is described in detail. The results on steel CT specimens appear very promising