Near-interfacial and Interfacial Fracture Simulation by the Extended Finite Element Method

Download or read book Near-interfacial and Interfacial Fracture Simulation by the Extended Finite Element Method written by Yuhai Yan and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Design of composite structures in many important industrial applications requires good understanding of the fracture behavior in the vicinity of material interfaces. In this study, near-interfacial and interfacial fractures are modeled by the extended finite element method (XFEM), a numerical technique developed recently to model crack propagation. In the XFEM, a crack, or a discontinuity in displacements, is represented by enriching the nodes around the crack with additional degrees of freedom associated with enrichment interpolation functions. Among the advantages of the XFEM are that no remeshing is needed; the crack path is independent of the finite element mesh; it is applicable to preexisting cracks as well as evolving cracks; and it is numerically robust although extra implementation efforts are needed. In order to deal efficiently with changes in the geometry and mesh topology, the level set method (LSM), an algorithm used to track evolving interfaces, is introduced and combined with the XFEM.