Application of PHT-splines in bending and vibration analysis of cracked Kirchhoff–Love plates

Abstract In this work, we present an eXtended Geometry Independent Field approximaTion (X–GIFT) formulation for cracked Kirchhoff–Love plates. The plate geometry is modeled by Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) while the solution is approximated by Polynomial Splines over Hierarchical T-meshes (PHT-splines) and enriched by the Heaviside function and crack tip asymptotic expansions. The adaptive refinement is driven by a recovery-based error estimator. The formulation is employed for bending and vibration analysis. We compare different strategies for refinement, enrichment and evaluation of fracture parameters. The obtained results are shown to be in a good agreement with the reference solutions.