Improving the conditioning of XFEM/GFEM for fracture mechanics problems through enrichment quasi-orthogonalization

Partition of unity enrichment is known to significantly enhance the accuracy of the finite element method by allowing the incorporation of known characteristics of the solution in the approximation space. However, in several cases it can further cause conditioning problems for which a number of remedies have been proposed in the framework of the extended/generalized finite element method (XFEM/GFEM). Those solutions often involve significant...