A simple and robust three-dimensional cracking-particle method without enrichment

A new robust and efficient approach for modeling discrete cracks in meshfree methods is described. The method is motivated by the cracking-particle method (Rabczuk T., Belytschko T., International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 2004) where the crack is modeled by a set of cracked segments. However, in contrast to the above mentioned paper, we do not introduce additional unknowns in the variational formulation to capture the...