Crack Growth analysis of plates Loaded by bending and tension using dual boundary element method

This paper presents an extension of the dual boundary element method to analysis of crack growth in plates loaded in combine bending and tension. Five stress intensity factors, two for membrane behaviour and three for shear deformable plate bending are computed using the J-Integral technique. Crack growth processes are simulated with an incremental crack extension analysis based on the maximum principal stress criterion. The method is considered effective since no remeshing is required and the crack extension is modelled by adding new boundary elements to the previous crack boundaries. Several incremental crack growth analysis for different configurations and loadings are presented.