Correction force for releasing crack tip element with XFEM and only discontinuous enrichment How to smoothly release the crack tip element with only discontinuous enrichment in XFEM?

This paper deals with numerical crack propagation and makes use of the extended finite element method in the case of explicit dynamics. The advantage of this method is the absence of remeshing. The use of XFEM with Heaviside functions only gives a binary description of the crack tip element: cut or not. Here, we modify the internal forces with a correction force in order to smoothly release the tip element while the virtual crack tip travels through an element. This avoids creating non physical stress waves and improves the accuracy of the evaluation of the stress intensity factors during propagation.