Meshless method for numerical simulation of crack propagation

Crack propagation is an important failure mechanism in aeronautical materials that requires accurate numerical model to capture stress singularity at the crack tip As a promising numerical simulation method, meshless computation has some outstanding advantages over the traditional finite element method (FEM) in treatment of arbitrary evolving discontinuity Because of the independence of elements, the adaptive refinement can be easily achieved, which makes the crack propogation analysis dramatically simplified By introducing enriched basis and nodal refinement, the computational accuracy was improved The continuous crack propagation was modelled as a series of linear crack growth increment At each increment the crack growth direction was determined based on the stress intensity factors The key technique and the flowchart of the method were presented The paper concludes with a sample calculation of oblique center crack plate of Ti 6Al 4V alloy under uniaxial tensile load The predicted crack trajectory by meshless method is in good agreement with the experimental data