  For the fatigue life of thin-walled components, not only fatigue crack
initiation, but also crack growth is decisive. The phase-field method for
fracture is a powerful tool to simulate arbitrary crack phenomena. Recently, it
has been applied to fatigue fracture. Those models pose an alternative to
classical fracture-mechanical approaches for fatigue life estimation. In the
first part of this paper, the parameters of a phase-field fatigue model are
calibrated and its predictions are compared to results of fatigue crack growth
experiments of aluminium sheet material. In the second part, compressive
residual stresses are introduced into the components with the help of laser
shock peening. It is shown that those residual stresses influence the crack
growth rate by retarding and accelerating the crack. In order to study these
fatigue mechanisms numerically, a simple strategy to incorporate residual
stresses in the phase-field fatigue model is presented and tested with
experiments. The study shows that the approach can reproduce the effects of the
residual stresses on the crack growth rate.
