High order boundary and finite elements for 3D fracture propagation in brittle materials

The quasi-static propagation of fracture in brittle materials was studied in several recent publications. A variational formulation (Salvadori, 2008; Salvadori and Carini, 2011; Salvadori and Fantoni, 2013) led to three-dimensional crack tracking strategies (Salvadori and Fantoni, 2014 [2,3]; Salvadori and Fantoni, 2016). One of the complexities of this new class of algorithms is the evaluation of high-order terms of the expansion of the crack...