Development of Automated Crack Propagation Analysis System : 1st Report, Outlines of the System and Finite Element Model Generation
Takashi Tokuda, Hiroshi Kawai, Hiroshi Okada, Yasuyoshi FUKUI · TRANSACTIONS OF THE JAPAN SOCIETY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS Series A · 2010
Although three-dimensional finite element analysis has become a common tool in the industries to perform their design analyses, there still exist some difficulties in performing three-dimensional fracture analyses. One of them is that although automatic mesh generation techniques are available for tetrahedral finite elements, hexahedral finite elements are commonly used in three-dimensional crack analyses. The other is that the analysis models tend to be large in their scales. Therefore performing a three-dimensional fracture analysis takes much manual labor in the analysis model generation processes and computational time. In present research, the authors have been developing a fracture mechanics analysis system that minimizes the manual labor. The key components in the analysis system are a mesh generation software and the virtual crack closure-integral method (VCCM) for the second-order tetrahedral finite element to evaluate the crack parameters (the energy release rates and the stress intensity factors). Based on them, the software system was carefully designed to handle large scale analysis model. In this paper, as the first report, the outlines of the system and the finite element model procedures are described.