Recently, applications of integrated large composite structures have been attempted to many structures of vehicles. In order to improve the cost performance and reliability, it is necessary to judge the structural integrity of the composite structures. Fracture simulation techniques using the finite element method have been developed for the purpose. Since iteration of finite element analysis is indispensable in the process of fracture simulation, the simulation techniques consume many memory resources and much of calculation time. A local area network with several personal computers can be utilized as a parallel computing system because of rapid development of personal computer architecture and network system. In this study, we developed a fracture simulation system with lower cost and faster calculation ability using the parallel computing system called a PC cluster. Several simulations with different calculation conditions were conducted to confirm the efficiency of the proposed simulation system. As a result, it is shown that the fracture simulation is suitable for the parallel computing system and can be accelerated inexpensively using the PC cluster.
