On the performance of strain smoothing for quadratic and enriched finite element approximations (XFEM/GFEM/PUFEM)

By using the strain smoothing technique proposed by Chen et al. ( Comput. Mech. 2000; 25 :137–156) for meshless methods in the context of the finite element method (FEM), Liu et al. ( Comput. Mech. 2007; 39 (6):859–877) developed the Smoothed FEM (SFEM). Although the SFEM is not yet well understood mathematically, numerical experiments point to potentially useful features of this particularly simple modification of the FEM. To date, the SFEM has...