Development of Physical Similitude Principles for Fatigue Damage Growth

Introduction to research: This project aims to develop fundamental principles to describe the similitude in fatigue damage growth in engineering materials and structures, in agreement with the physics of this damage growth. To this aim, fatigue damage growth is experimentally and numerically studied in monolithic metals, adhesively bonded interfaces, and composites.

Instead of developing phenomenological relationships based on a selection of fracture mechanics parameters, which is current state of art, this project retraces past steps by returning to the original energy balance principles in which available energy is correlated to the required energy for damage growth.

R.C. Alderliesten