A direct evaluation of stress intensity factors using the Extended Dual Boundary Element Method

We introduce an alternative method in computational fracture mechanics to evaluate Stress Intensity Factors (SIFs) directly using the Extended Dual Boundary Element Method (XBEM) for 2D problems. Like other enrichment approaches, the new approach is able to yield accurate results on coarse discretisations, and the enrichment increases the problem size by only two degrees of freedom per crack tip. The BEM equations formed by collocation at nodes...