Fatigue is one of the main causes of failures in mechanical and structural systems. Offshore installations, in particular, are susceptible to fatigue failure due to their exposure to the combination of wind loads, wave loads and currents. In order to assess the safety of the components of these installations, the expected lifetime of the component needs to be estimated. The fatigue life is the sum of the number of loading cycles required for a fatigue crack to initiate, and the number of cycles required for the crack to propagate before sudden fracture occurs. Since analytical determination of the fatigue crack propagation life in real geometries is rarely viable, crack propagation problems are normally solved using some computational method. In this review the use of the finite element method (FEM) and the extended finite element method (XFEM) to model fatigue crack propagation is discussed. The basic techniques are presented, together with some of the recent developments.
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