Numerical Simulations Of 3-D Cracks Using Coupled Efgm And Fem

This article presents a numerical solution of three-dimensional cracks using coupled EFGM and FEM. The FEM adequately handles problems without discontinuities but faces severe limitations in solving crack growth problems, while EFGM does fairly well in handling such problems. Hence, EFGM has been used in a region near the crack whereas FEM has been utilized in the rest of the region. In the interface/transition region, a coupling scheme known as mixed-mode interpolation is used to obtain the shape functions. These simulations show that the results obtained by the coupled scheme are found to be in good agreement with analytical solutions.