On the use of quarter-point tetrahedral finite elements in linear elastic fracture mechanics

By M. Nejati, A. Paluszny, R. Zimmerman. 2015

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Abstract This paper discusses the reproduction of the square root singularity in quarter-point tetrahedral (QPT) finite elements. Numerical results confirm that the stress singularity is modeled accurately in a fully unstructured mesh by using QPTs. A displacement correlation (DC) scheme is proposed in combination with QPTs to compute stress intensity factors (SIF) from arbitrary meshes, yielding an average error of 2–3%. This straightforward method is computationally cheap and easy to implement. The results of an extensive parametric study also suggest the existence of an optimum mesh-dependent distance from the crack front at which the DC method computes the most accurate SIFs.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanics of Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b37c7253a86bbfc22fe9d253c6e184d625952613