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WileyGonzález Albuixech, VF.; Giner Maravilla, E.; Tarancón Caro, JE.; Fuenmayor Fernández, FJ.; Gravouil, A. (2013). Convergence of domain integrals for stress intensity factor extraction in 2-D curved cracks problems with the extended finite element method. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering. 94(8):740-757. doi:10.1002/nme.4478. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Int. J. Numer. Meth. Engng 2013; 94:740-757, which has been published in final form at Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com SUMMARYThe aim of this study is the analysis of the convergence rates achieved with domain energy integrals for the computation of the stress intensity factors (SIF) when solving 2-D curved crack problems with the extended finite element method (XFEM). Domain integrals, specially the J-integral and the interaction integral, are widely used for SIF extraction and provide high accurate estimations with finite element methods. The crack description in XFEM is usually realized using level sets. This allows to define a local basis associated with the crack geometry. In this work the effect of the level set local basis definition on the domain integral has been studied. The usual definition of the interaction integral involves hypotheses that are not fulfilled in generic curved crack problems and we introduce some modifications to improve the behavior in curved crack analyses. Despite the good accuracy of domain integrals, convergence rates are not always optimal and convergence to the exact solution cannot be assured for curved cracks. The lack of convergence is associated with the effect of the curvature on the definition of the auxiliary extraction fields. With our modified integral proposal, the optimal convergence rate is achieved by controlling the q-function and the size of the extraction domain.

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ElsevierGonzález Albuixech, VF.; Giner Maravilla, E.; Tarancón Caro, JE.; Fuenmayor Fernández, FJ.; Gravouil, A. (2013) AbstractThe computation of stress intensity factors (SIF) in curved and non-planar cracks using domain integrals introduces some difficulties related to the use of curvilinear gradients. Several approaches exist in the literature that consider curvilinear corrections within a finite element framework, but these depend on each particular crack configuration and they are not general. In this work, we introduce the curvilinear gradient correction within the extended finite element method framework (XFEM), based only on the level set information used for the crack description and the local coordinate system definition. Our formulation depends only on the level sets coordinates and, therefore, an explicit analytical description of the crack is not needed. It is shown that this curvilinear correction improves the results and enables the study of generic cracks. In addition, we have introduced a simple error indicator for improving the SIF computed via the interaction integral, thanks to the better behaviour of the J-integral as it does not need auxiliary extraction fields.

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