A novel multi-grid based reanalysis approach for efficient prediction of fatigue crack propagation

Abstract

In order to model the fatigue crack propagation of engineering structures with high efficiency, a novel multi-grid (MG) reanalysis method is formulated in this study under the framework of the extended finite element method (XFEM). In the numerical approach, the MG is firstly used to establish connections between the mesh with no crack and the meshes with crack. The transfer operators are constructed only in the initial MG analysis and will be reused in the crack propagation analysis. Then, the equilibrium equations of crack propagation can be efficiently solved through the MG iterations. Several numerical examples are investigated to verify the validity of this method and it is shown that the presented algorithm is very accurate and can efficiently reduce the computational cost.