Implementations of parallel software for crack analyses based on the improved XFEM

The extended finite element method (XFEM) has been a state-of-the-art tool for crack analyses. However, the method has been long hampered in engineering applications by two major issues. One is the global stiffness matrix in static analyses being highly ill-conditioned. The other one is the inconsistent energy transfer between the neighboring time steps in dynamic analyses. The first issue leads to bad convergence in large-scale engineering applications where iterative equation solvers are mainly used. The second issue causes poor accuracy and difficulties in implementations of dynamic analyses. In order to overcome these two issues, the improved XFEM is proposed, based on an extra-dof-free PU approximation. Thereby, parallel software for crack analyses, PANDA_Fracture, is developed based on the proposed method with an HPC framework for numerical applications—JAUMIN. As numerical examples indicate, the software PANDA_Fracture has several distinguished features. Firstly, it introduces highly accurate crack tip enrichment and supports arbitrary crack propagation. Secondly, it supports both implicit and explicit dynamic analyses. Thirdly, it supports multiple crack analyses with high efficiency. Fourthly, it scales up to one thousand CPU cores for high-performance simulations.