Development of dynamic mesh superposition method for local tensile stress evaluation

Abstract

The brittle crack propagation and arrest behavior has been studied for a long time. The critical condition is not completely clear, but the local fracture stress criterion is recently regarded as a most promising description of brittle crack propagation and arrest behavior. Although accurate finite element analyses should be employed to obtain the local stresses, it is not realistic to use conventional finite element analyses because computational cost is too high. According to the above background, we focused on mesh superposition method to cope with both reduction of computational cost and improvement of local stress evaluation accuracy. At first, stationary crack problem is solved and it is shown that results agree with conventional solutions, and verified the availability of this method. Then this method is used for dynamic crack propagation and it is verified that mesh superposition method is also applicable to dynamic crack growth.