Application of the virtual crack closure technique (VCCT) using tetrahedral finite elements to calculate the stress intensity factor

This paper proposes an approach for calculating the stress intensity factor (SIF) based on the virtual crack closure technique (VCCT) using tetrahedral finite elements. An important feature of this approach is that tetrahedral element meshes with no strict requirements of shape can be employed to calculate the SIF with the VCCT. Therefore, structures with cracks can be meshed automatically and easily using arbitrary tetrahedral elements. Two cases with different crack shapes are presented to assess the validity of the proposed approach. Reasonable agreement between the proposed method and analytical solutions are obtained.