Performance of quarter-point boundary elements in analysing thermally stressed kinked and curved cracks
✍ Scribed by Dimitrios E. Katsareas; Nikolaos K. Anifantis
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 908 KB
- Volume
- 137
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0045-7825
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✦ Synopsis
The performance of quarter-point and traction-singular quarter-point boundary elements, dealing with kinked and curved thermal cracks, is investigated. These special crack-tip elements simulate correctly the rl" and r-l'* near-tip behavior of temperature/displacement and heat flux/thermal stress fields, respectively. The well-known displacement and traction-based formulas are generalized for any crack configuration and used for the evaluation of heat flux and mixed-mode thermal stress intensity factors. The two-dimensional stationary thermoelasticity problem is solved via the boundary-only element method, .L_____. . .~, rnrougn wmcn voiume discretization is compieteiy eiiminated. it is demonstrated by the conducted numericai experiments that present results converge to the exact ones, obtained from the literature, when the crack-tip element size tends to zero. The accuracy of the proposed method is maintained at high levels for all crack configurations considered, without the need for a dense mesh. This conclusion stands even for cracks nearly zero in size, thus rendering the method a potent tool for thermal crack initiation and extension analysis.