Abstract
A step-by-step finite element approach has been developed for the simulation of curved crack growth, where a cracked domain is successively re-meshed by an automatic mesh generator. It is well known that the pre-processing is a cumbersome procedure in such a simulation, so that an efficient pre-processor has been developed by using an automatic quadrilateral mesh generator based on the paving method. In order to obtain a favorable mesh density distribution, improvements of the algorithms and implementation of a new conversion technique for quadrilateral elements are made for the paving method. An automatic boundary nodes generator with an embedded template-mesh around a crack tip is developed for the preprocessor of a crack analysis, which is applied to problems with single and multiple-crack tip. The accuracy and the effectiveness of the crack analysis are confirmed by a numerical example. Since the path of a curved crack may sometimes be influenced by the selection of the increment size of a crack, an appropriate numerical procedure including re-analysis is proposed. The validity of the method is then demonstrated by the simulation of wavy crack growth of thermally induced brittle cracking.
