A virtual crack closure-integral method (VCCM) to compute the energy release rates and stress intensity factors based on quadratic tetrahedral finite elements

This paper proposes a new virtual crack closure-integral method (VCCM) for quadratic tetrahedral finite element to compute the energy release rates/stress intensity factors. The formulations, numerical implementations and some numerical results of proposed VCCM are presented in this paper. Proposed VCCM enables LIS to adopt the tetrahedral finite element in 3D crack problems and LIS to use automatic mesh generation programs. Therefore process time to perform 3D crack analysis drastically reduces compared with the case of hexahedral elements. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.