ACCURATE COMPUTATION ON DYNAMIC SIFS USING IMPROVED XFEM

Compared to the standard extended finite element method (XFEM), the improved XFEM overcomes, in theory, the linear dependence and the ill-conditioning issues, and improves in magnitude of orders the efficiency of linear system solve. In particular, in dynamic crack propagation problems, thanks to the exclusion of the extra dofs on crack tip enriched nodes, the new method eliminates the issue of energy inconsistency or the inconservitive energy transfer caused by dof dynamics, and provides more accurate dynamic stress intensity factors (DSIFs) with much less numerical oscillation. To the best of our knowledge, numerical solution on DSIFs for crack propagation under dynamic loading remains engineeringly unsatisfied. In this paper, the extra-dof free XFEM is extended to implicitly dynamic crack propagation problems-still a remaining difficulty for the current XFEMs. The implicit Newmark algorithm is used for time discretization. A dynamic interaction integral method is employed for DSIFs for both stationary and moving cracks under dynamic loading. Compared with the interaction integral method for static cracks, the dynamic method considers the effects of crack growth speed and inertia terms. The paper investigates in detail the influences of element size, mass matrix formulation, time step size, crack tip enriched zone size, inertia term, crack growth speed, and J-domain mesh/cell sizes of the interaction integral. Numerical tests show satisified accuracy and efficiency of the new method for dynamic crack problems. In particular on the challenging benchmark problem "Mode I semi-infinite stationary and then moving crack", the new improved XFEM provides the best DSIFs up to the time of publication.