Study of Crack Propagation in Flat Surfaces Through Experimental and Numerical Work

This paper aims to numerically model the crack growth path in linear elastic materials under cyclic loading. The effect of crack initiation, propagation, and fatigue life under constant amplitude tensile loading specimens has been studied. The model is preprocessed, the level set updated, the stress intensity factor is calculated, and the crack propagation analysis is performed using Abaqus built-in and external MATLAB functions. Linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) has been adopted for the crack analysis process. The aspects of the implementation and proposed treatments for enriched element processing, framework preparation, stress intensity factor evaluation, and numerical analyses have been described in detail. The proposed method's accuracy and robustness are examined through numerical simulated examples of stationary and crack growth problems using 2D and 3D models. Paris's law has been used to evaluate the fatigue, which involves carefully evaluating stress intensity factors. Different Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) methodologies and frameworks have been developed to simulate the initiation and propagation of 2 and 3-dimensional micro-cracks through versatile physical models of structures. The results have excellent agreements with the literature's analytical, numerical, and experimental analyses.