New Technique for Frictional Contact on Crack Slip in the Extended Finite-Element Method Framework

The traditional extended finite-element method (XFEM) encounters some challenges in the problems of frictional contact because the contact forces acting on the interface of cracks are difficult to determine. In this paper, a new method for the simulation for frictional contact on crack slip in the framework of the XFEM is proposed. Coulomb's frictional model is introduced as the frictional constitutive model. The detection points are sowed on the interface to detect the contact states of the cracks and to interpolate the displacement of the grid node. The formulations of the contact forces and the penalty terms are established in the framework of the XFEM. Moreover, testing of a specimen containing two pre-existing flaws under uniaxial compression was conducted. In this experiment, an image processing technique is introduced to deal with the pictures of the real-time process of the specimen, which are captured by a high-speed dynamic recording system. The results from the proposed numerical method are in good agreement with the experimental data.