A super crack front element for three-dimensional fracture mechanics analysis

A super crack front element containing a part of a curved crack front is established to solve the stress intensity factors of three-dimensional curved cracks by using the numerical series eigensolutions. The element can be directly incorporated into the existing three-dimensional linear brick elements without using transition elements. The intensity of singular stress fields is determined as the system unknowns appearing as nodal displacement values. Numerical studies are conducted to demonstrate the simplicity and effectiveness of the proposed technique in handling typical three-dimensional fracture problems of curved cracks. It is proved that the super crack front element can avoid mesh refinement near the crack front domain without loss of calculation accuracy and velocity of convergence, and can be used to deal with interfacial and anisotropic fracture problems directly.