Development of automated crack propagation analysis system (2nd report, the crack propagation analysis system and finite element model generation for the crack propagation)

The authors have been developing a fully automated three-dimensional crack propagation analysis system. Although three-dimensional finite element analyses have become a common tool in the industries to perform design analyses, there still exist many difficulties in performing threedimensional crack propagation analyses. That is because, although fully automatic mesh generation techniques are available for tetrahedral finite elements, hexahedral elements are commonly used in three-dimensional crack analyses. Furthermore, the analysis models tend to be large in their scales. The key components of present analysis system are the mesh generation software and virtual crack closure-integral method (VCCM) for the second-order tetrahedral finite element. VCCM is an energetic method to compute the stress intensity factors. In this paper, methodologies in automatic mesh generation for crack propagation analysis are described in detail and some numerical examples are presented.