Fracture control is a systematic process to prevent fracture during operation that depends on the criticality of the component, the economic consequences of the structures being out of service, and the damage that would be caused by a fracture failure. This article describes the key principles of fracture control and reviews the concepts of damage tolerance analysis. It further presents practical guidelines to obtain useful and reasonable answers from damage tolerance analysis. The article concludes with information on fracture mechanics and fatigue design.

Damage tolerance analysis consists of three parts such as the calculation of the residual strength diagram to obtain the permissible crack size, calculation of the crack growth curve, and calculation of the inspection interval. This article discusses the aspects of obtaining material property data and geometry factors to analyze any fracture or crack growth problem. It describes the integration of crack growth rates in terms of constant-amplitude loading and cycle-by-cycle counting with variable-amplitude loading. The article concludes with information on the classification of sources of error in damage tolerance analysis.