A COMBINED EXTENDED AND EDGE-BASED SMOOTHED FINITE ELEMENT METHOD (ES-XFEM) FOR FRACTURE ANALYSIS OF 2D ELASTICITY

This study combines the edge-based smoothed finite element method (ES-FEM) and the extended finite element method (XFEM) to develop a new simulation technique (ES-XFEM) for fracture analysis of 2D elasticity. In the XFEM, the need for the mesh alignment with the crack and remeshing, as the crack evolves, is eliminated because of the use of partition of unity. The ES-FEM uses the generalized smoothing operation over smoothing domain associated with edges of simplex meshes, and produces a softening effect leading to a close-to-exact stiffness, "super-convergence" and "ultra-accurate" solutions for the numerical model. Taking advantage of both ES-FEM and XFEM, the present method introduces the edge-based strain smoothing technique into the context of XFEM. Thanks to strain smoothing, the necessity of sub-division in elements cut by discontinuities is suppressed via transforming interior integration into boundary integration. Hence, it simplifies the numerical integration procedure in the XFEM. Numerical examples showed that the proposed method improves significantly the accuracy of stress intensity factors and achieves a quasi optimal convergence rate in the energy norm without geometrical enrichment or blending correction.