Strategy for simulating high-speed crack propagation in 3D-plate structures based on S-version FEM

Plate structures serve as the fundamental components of many large structures; therefore, dynamic crack propagation in plates is a significant safety concern. This paper proposes a novel strategy based on the s-version finite element method (s-method) for simulating high-speed crack propagation in a 3D plate structure. We employed a combination of the nodal force release technique and local mesh update method to simulate a dynamically propagating crack front. The global mesh was generated based on the entire domain geometry without considering crack propagation, which significantly simplified the mesh generation procedure, whereas the local mesh was generated only in the vicinity of the crack front with fine elements to ensure high accuracy. In the proposed strategy, the local mesh completely covered the crack front beyond the surface of the 3D plate structure. Such an incompatibility between the surface of the target domain and boundaries of the local mesh causes non-negligible errors in the conventional s-method. Hence, we propose an approach based on Heaviside enrichment to eliminate these errors. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, numerical examples to analyse the experimental results of high-speed crack propagation in double cantilever beam-type plate specimens made of polymethyl methacrylate are presented. The numerical results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed strategy for simulating high-speed crack propagation in 3D plate structures. Therefore, the proposed strategy has the potential to serve as a fundamental numerical framework for simulating dynamic crack propagation in engineering structures.