An examination of methods of assessing interacting surface cracks by comparison with experimental data

Methods of assessing the low cycle fatigue crack growth of interacting surface cracks are discussed and evaluated by the comparison of crack growth predictions with experimental data. The comparisons show that recently proposed assessment methods are a singificant improvement in safety and accuracy over older techniques. In particular, the commonly used conditions for the assessment of non-coplanar cracks are shown to be unsafe. Improved conditions are proposed.