Abstract Because low-cycle fatigue is one of the failure modes in steel structures during earthquakes, crack growth prediction in the low-cycle fatigue region has become an important factor in the evaluation of the seismic performance of steel structures. This study conducted fatigue crack growth tests with several kinds of structural steels to clarify their crack growth behaviour in the low-cycle fatigue region. These tests employed an elastic compliance technique usually used in the high-cycle fatigue region to determine crack size. Before applying the elastic compliance method to a low-cycle fatigue crack growth test, a correlation between specimen load-line crack-opening elastic compliance and crack size was analytically derived. The test results indicated that crack sizes obtained by the elastic compliance method agree relatively well with those actually measured from images. Moreover, it was revealed that the crack growth rate can be correlated with the cyclic J-integral range calculated by finite element analysis, and that the relationships between the crack growth rate and the cyclic J-integral range are similar regardless of the steel type.
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