A HYBRIDIZED DISPLACEMENT DISCONTINUITY AND INDIRECT BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD TO MODEL FRACTURE PROPAGATION

In mechanical modelling of fracture propagation, complications arise from the stress concentrations at the fracture tips and nonlinear responses caused by opening/closing of fractures, by nonlinear constitutive relations of fracture surfaces sliding on each other, and by fracture propagation. The hybridized Displacement Discontinuity and Indirect Boundary Element Method described in this paper avoids problems associated with other numerical methods when analyzing fracture propagation. The method, which includes analytical influence functions and thus makes numerical integration unnecessary, is described in the first part of this paper. In the second part a number of examples are given in which a variety of fracture propagation problems in two dimensions are modelled with the hybridized method. These examples include classical problems in which tension is applied to cracked plates but also others where shearing is applied. Comparisons with solutions obtained by other authors are shown to be satisfactory. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.