No abstract

In turbine blades of aero-engines typical defects are cracks due to high mechanical and thermal loads. The extended finite element method (XFEM) is used for simulations of fracture mechanics problems with cracks. Discontinuities in the displacement and temperature field are allowed and the crack opening displacement and crack tip stress field are reproduced accurately. Since crack closure and non-physical penetration of the crack surfaces may occur under certain load conditions, it becomes necessary to enforce the non-penetration condition for crack surfaces. This contact formulation is assumed to be frictionless. The node-to-segment approach proposed in [3] is extended to ten-node tetrahedral elements with quadratic shape functions.