Fatigue crack growth rate of a Pressure Vessel: Experimental and Computational model

There are different documents containing fatigue crack propagation limit or design curves and rules for the prediction of crack growth. This paper investigates computational modeling and experimental of fatigue life analysis in pressure vessel. A broken steel pressure vessel was tested and analyzed in order to predict its lifetime. Mechanical properties, fracture toughness and fatigue behavior were determined experimentally. Three-dimensional finite element analysis were carried out in order to determine the stress intensity factor as a function of crack length for the case in which the pressure vessel contains a surface crack in reduced cross section. The fatigue data was assumed to follow the Paris-Erdogan law. Finally, the experimental results were compared with the computational modeling and it was specified that the modeling results has good agreement with the experimental data.