An improved crack-tip element treatment for advanced FEMs

This paper presents an improved treatment for those advanced FEMs that use stresses in the crack-tip element for evaluation crack propagation condition. We show that the common treatment of obtaining crack-tip displacements using simple interpolation from the edge of the crack-tip element is inaccurate and is responsible for the jagged jump and unwarping behavior (JJU) frequently reported in literature. In this study we propose a more accurate...