Thermal-mechanical crack propagation in orthotropic composite materials by the extended four-node consecutive-interpolation element (XCQ4)

A numerical study of thermal-mechanical crack growth in orthotropic composite materials by the recently developed extended nodal gradient finite element method is presented. The extended four-node consecutive-interpolation quadrilateral element (XCQ4) used in this work is the conventional four-node quadrilateral element, but it is enhanced by additional terms of averaged nodal gradients to smoothen the derivative fields and increase the accuracy...