Abstract
The applications of fracture mechanics have traditionally concentrated on cracks loaded by tensile stresses, and growing under an opening or mode I mechanism. However, many cases of failures occur from growth of cracks subjected to mixed mode loading. Several criteria have been proposed regarding the crack growth direction under mixed mode loadings. This paper is aimed at investigation of fatigue crack growth behaviour under mixed mode(I+II) with variation of angle and pre-crack length in two dimensional branched type precrack. Especially the direction of fatigue crack propagation was predicted and effective stress intensity factor was calculated by finite element analysis(FEA. In this paper, the maximum tangential stress(MTS) criterion was used to predict crack growth direction. Not only experiment but also finite element analysis was carried out and the theoretical predictions were compared with experimental results.