A New Singular S-FEM For The Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics

A new approach of singular S-FEM has been proposed in this dissertation for the linear elastic fracture mechanics problems in both two and three dimensional spaces. A softer model than that of FEM has been developed by using strain smoothing technique on a set of non-overlapping and no-gapping linear elements. Using the S-FEM, one only needs to calculate the displacement (and not the derivatives) over the boundaries of smoothing domains to compute the stiffness matrix of the system. Adopting this important feature, two new element types have been proposed and formulated to produce a proper stress singularity near the crack tip based on a basic mesh of linear triangular/tetrahedral elements that can be generated automatically for problems with complicated geometries. Numerical analyses and comparisons of proposed method with the currently widely-used singular FEM reveal the better performance of our method in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency.

Author dc:creator

• SAYEDEH NASIBEH NOURBAKHSH NIA

• Smoothed finite element method, Fracture mechanics, Numerical methods, Computational mechanics