Author(s)

G. Kuhn & P. Partheymuller

Abstract

An automatic crack growth algorithm is presented to analyze the stable crack propagation for arbitrary three-dimensional problems considering lin- ear-elastic material behaviour. The numerical simulation is based on the dual boundary element method (Dual BEM) and stress intensity factor cal- culation. The K-values along the crack front are evaluated very accurately from the numerical field of stresses by a special extrapolation algorithm controlled by the correlation coefficient. Several crack growth criteria have been implemented. For both problems with embedded cracks and prob- lems with surface breaking cracks, the numerical model for the next step of the simulation is created in a fully automatic procedure. To illustrate the realized 3D-crack growt

Keywords