A Novel Approach for Thermoelastic Fracture Simulation in Bimaterials Using Element-Free Galerkin Method with Improved Interface Modeling

Layered materials play a crucial role in numerous essential structures, including adhesive connections, composite laminates, and various electronic components. This work focuses on proposing a novel framework of algorithms to improve the adaptability of element-free Galerkin method for modeling fracture in bimaterials exposed to thermoelastic loads. A bimaterial fracture problem is modeled as a combination of both weak and strong discontinuities — strong discontinuity owing to the presence of crack and weak discontinuity due to inherent material discontinuities. Initially, three distinct methods, comprising domain partitioning, lagrange multiplier, and jump function have been employed for interface crack modeling and error norm is used as an indicator to select the optimum one. Second, a novel interface enrichment algorithm has been introduced to effectively model the interface with limited computational costs with higher accuracy. Owing to the applicability of bimaterials in numerous applications under a combination of thermal/mechanical loads, the proposed formulation has been utilized for modeling and simulating a diverse bimaterial thermoelastic fracture problems using the proposed framework. The mixed mode (complex) stress intensity factors (SIFs) are numerically examined using modified domain form of interaction integral. A good agreement of results with available results from literature extends the computational prowess of the proposed framework in modeling a variety of thermoelastic bimaterial problems accurately and swiftly as compared to conventional EFGM.