Practical Defect Tolerance Assessment: From Defects to Engineering Decisions

F​ree Webinar

Tuesday, 11 August 2026

15:00 (London) | 16:00 (Berlin)
07:00 (Los Angeles) | 10:00 (New York)

From my experience, performing fracture and structural integrity assessments in practice can be challenging for engineers without prior exposure, as these methods are not commonly taught at university level.

While the underlying theory is often covered, there is a clear gap in applying these approaches using widely adopted fitness-for-service (FFS) procedures (e.g. R6, BS 7910, and API 579) to real engineering problems.

The webinar would focus on a practical, end-to-end application of defect tolerance assessment, demonstrating how to:

• define the assessment case and loading
• derive stress inputs (analytical or FE-based)
• apply fracture assessment procedures
• construct and interpret the Failure Assessment Diagram (FAD)
• make an engineering integrity decision

The aim would be to bridge the gap between theoretical fracture mechanics and real-world structural integrity assessment, providing members with a clear understanding of how DTAs are carried out in practice across different industries.

O​ur Speaker ...

Dr. Peter Akhigbe-Midu, Structural Analysis Technical Lead at Rolls-Royce SMR

• Structural analysis technical lead at Rolls Royce SMR. Provide technical leadership and oversight over different types of structural integrity assessments which underpins the design substantiation of a variety of components across the plant.
• Achieved CEng within 18 months of joining the industry post-PhD. This is in the top 1% historically.
• Professional Simulation Engineer (PSE) NAFEMS in five technical areas.
• EDF Suitably Qualified and Experienced Personnel (SQEP) in three technical areas.
• Subject matter expert in fracture mechanics. Performed fracture and fatigue simulations using fe-safe, XFEM, VCE among others with 10 years of experience in the set-up and running of different types of Finite Element Analysis models using Abaqus and Ansys.
• Saved Parker Hannifin 70 000 USD year on year with the new flanges I designed.
• Discovered a new relationship for number of cycles to failure of a structure thus solving the 40 year old problem of "size effect " in scaling empirical fatigue power laws such as Paris, Coffin- Manson and Basquin laws.
• Became the first person in the world to use two scaled experiments to predict low and high cycle fatigue behaviour.
• Modelling of composite materials and performing fluid structure interaction analysis of composites in Ansys.
• Proficient in programming scripts to automate tasks in the creation and post processing of Finite Element simulations.