Effect of material irregularities on fatigue crack growth by enriched techniques
Azher Jameel, G.A. Harmain
Abstract
The present study investigates the behaviour of propagating cracks in engineering materials containing different material irregularities like bi-material interfaces and holes by employing enriched numerical techniques. Three enriched techniques like the extended finite element method, the element free Galerkin method and the Coupled finite element-element free Galerkin method have been used for analysis. The enriched techniques provide strong numerical tools for modelling different discontinuities independent of the mesh or the grid due to which the problems of conformal meshing, mesh adaption and remeshing do not occur. The level set method has been used to represent different types of discontinuities present in the domain. Several numerical problems, involving fatigue crack growth in presence of bi-material interfaces and holes, are solved to illustrate the applicability, efficiency and accuracy of the three enriched techniques in modelling such problems.