This paper presents a strain smoothing procedure for the extended finite element method (XFEM). The resulting “edge-based” smoothed extended finite element method (ESm-XFEM) is tailored to linear elastic fracture mechanics and, in this context, to outperform the standard XFEM. In the XFEM, the displacement-based approximation is enriched by the Heaviside and asymptotic crack tip functions using the framework of partition of unity. This eliminates the need for the mesh alignment with the crack and re-meshing, as the crack evolves. Edge-based smoothing (ES) relies on a generalized smoothing operation over smoothing domains associated with edges of simplex meshes, and produces a softening effect leading to a close-to-exact stiffness, “super-convergence” and “ultra-accurate” solutions. The present method takes advantage of both the ES-FEM and the XFEM. Thanks to the use of strain smoothing, the subdivision of elements intersected by discontinuities and of integrating the (singular) derivatives of the approximation functions is suppressed via transforming interior integration into boundary integration. Numerical examples show that the proposed method improves significantly the accuracy of stress intensity factors and achieves a near optimal convergence rate in the energy norm even without geometrical enrichment or blending correction.
A phantom-node method is developed for three-node shell elements to describe cracks. This method can treat arbitrary cracks independently of the mesh. The crack may cut elements completely or partially. Elements are overlapped on the position of the crack, and they are partially integrated to implement the discontinuous displacement across the crack. To consider the element containing a crack tip, a new kinematical relation between the overlapped elements is developed. There is no enrichment function for the discontinuous displacement field. Several numerical examples are presented to illustrate the proposed method.
This paper proposes an adaptive atomistic- continuum numerical method for quasi-static crack growth. The phantom node method is used to model the crack in the continuum region and a molecular statics model is used near the crack tip. To ensure self-consistency in the bulk, a virtual atom cluster is used to model the material of the coarse scale. The coupling between the coarse scale and fine scale is realized through ghost atoms. The ghost atom positions are interpolated from the coarse scale solution and enforced as boundary conditions on the fine scale. The fine scale region is adaptively enlarged as the crack propagates and the region behind the crack tip is adaptively coarsened. An energy criterion is used to detect the crack tip location. The triangular lattice in the fine scale region corresponds to the lattice structure of the (111) plane of an FCC crystal. The Lennard-Jones potential is used to model the atom–atom interactions. The method is implemented in two dimensions. The results are compared to pure atomistic simulations; they show excellent agreement.
In the context of finite element model updating using output-only vibration test data, natural frequencies and mode shapes are used as validation criteria. Consequently, the correct pairing of experimentally obtained and numerically derived natural frequencies and mode shapes is important. In many cases, only limited spatial information is available and noise is present in the measurements. Therefore, the automatic selection of the most likely numerical mode shape corresponding to a particular experimentally identified mode shape can be a difficult task. The most common criterion for indicating corresponding mode shapes is the modal assurance criterion. Unfortunately, this criterion fails in certain cases and is not reliable for automatic approaches. In this paper, the purely mathematical modal assurance criterion will be enhanced by additional physical information from the numerical model in terms of modal strain energies. A numerical example and a benchmark study with experimental data are presented to show the advantages of the proposed energy-based criterion in comparison to the traditional modal assurance criterion.