Application of perturbation methods in finite element analysis of stress corrosion cracking

Finite elements analysis of magnetic nondestructive evaluation phenomena often involves modeling of complex interactions between the magnetostatic fields and tight, zero volume cracks in large structures. The modeling effort therefore faces significant challenges in terms of large memory storage and computation time requirements. This paper presents an approach based on perturbation methods for finite element modeling of a colony of stress corrosion cracks in a gas transmission pipeline.