Computational fracture mechanics: accuracy and efficiency without enrichment

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Professor Will Coombs, Department of Engineering, Durham University
• Friday 22 November 2019, 15:00-16:00
• Seminar Room, Civil Engineering Building, JJ Thomson Avenue 7a..

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Maria Marques de Carvalho.

Modelling fracture in brittle materials remains a challenging problem in computational mechanics. In order to make fracture/fatigue predictions, engineers require accurate determination the stress intensity factors at the tips/fronts of evolving fracture networks. Most methods that are able to obtain accuracies suitable for fatigue predictions do so by incorporating knowledge of the stress field around the crack tip within the numerical method. However, these stress field solutions are only valid for specific materials and in the immediate vicinity of the crack tips, there are also computational issues when analysing problems involving several propagating fractures. This presentation will detail a Configurational Force-based method that removes the necessity of knowing the stress field a priori whilst producing very accurate stress intensity values at crack tips [1]. The proposed method is demonstrated to be path independent and is combined with a robust a posteriori residual error estimator [2] which can be used to quantify the errors associated with the fracture predictions. Accuracies are achieved which are at least 100 times more accurate than other numerical methods which make no assumption about the local tip stress field. This opens the door for Configurational Force-based methods to be used for fatigue predictions.

[1] Bird, R.E., Coombs, W.M. & Giani, S. (2019). Accurate Configuration Force Evaluation via hp-adaptive Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Analysis. Engineering Fracture Mechanics 216: 106370. [2] Bird, R. E., Coombs, W. M. & Giani, S. (2019). A posteriori discontinuous Galerkin error estimator for linear elasticity. Applied Mathematics and Computation 344-345: 78-96.

This talk is part of the Engineering Structures Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge University Engineering Department Talks
• Cambridge talks
• Centre for Smart Infrastructure & Construction
• Civil Engineering Talks
• Computational Continuum Mechanics Group Seminars
• Engineering Department Structures Research Seminars
• Engineering Structures Seminar Series
• Featured lists
• Interested Talks
• School of Technology
• Seminar Room, Civil Engineering Building, JJ Thomson Avenue 7a.
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.