Analysis of dynamic crack propagation in two-dimensional elastic bodies by coupling the boundary element method and the bond-based peridynamics

Abstract

A novel method for predicting dynamic crack propagation based on coupling the boundary element method (BEM) and bond-based peridynamics (BBPD) is developed in this work. The special feature of this method is that it can take full advantages of both the BEM and PD to achieve a higher level of accuracy and efficiency. Based on the scale of the structure and the location of cracks, the considered domain can be divided into a non-cracked region and a cracked region. For the non-cracked region, a meshfree boundary-domain integral equation method (meshfree-BDIEM) is employed in the analysis to reduce the dimension by one and to increase the computational efficiency. The bond-based PD is applied to simulate the cracked region, which can model the initiation and propagation of the cracks automatically. The boundary nodes from the BEM on the interfaces can interact with the material points from the PD directly. By using the displacement continuity and force equilibrium conditions on the interfaces, a combined model is obtained by merging the mass, stiffness, and force matrices from each region of the domain. Both the implicit and explicit BEM-PD coupled solution methods can deliver accurate results without inducing the ghost forces. Several benchmark problems of dynamic crack propagation have been modeled by using the method, which demonstrate that the developed BEM-PD coupled approach can be an efficient numerical tool to model the dynamic crack propagation problems.