Fatigue is a process in engineering materials in which damage accumulates due to the fluctuating loading. One solution for a component under the fatigue process is to arrest the crack propagation before the final failure using different available retardation methods, such as drilling/stop-hole technique. In addition, structural components may also suffer from the existence of micro-cracks or voids due to their forming process or service lives. These micro-cracks/voids are very critical to study, since they can effectively play an important role in the behavior of the existing main crack in a component. This article aims to investigate the effect of the stop-hole retardation technique and multiple micro-cracks/voids with different characteristic lengths and geometries on the fatigue crack propagation in a compact tension specimen. A modified Forman equation, the so-called NASGRO equation is used to define the transition between crack initiation and crack growth period. Also, the extended finite element method is adapted in the crack propagation phase in order to model crack path in the geometry eliminating the need for remeshing procedure. The whole analyses are conducted in a commercial package through a user-written code that handles all fatigue crack growth analysis. The reference solutions from the literature are used to compare and to validate results obtained from current work.
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