A Development in the Finite Volume Method for the Crack Growth Analysis without Global Remeshing

Crack growth analysis has remained one of the challenging problems in the fracture mechanics of structures. On the other hand, the fatigue crack growth is a common phenomenon in the components of structures like airplanes, navies and fluid storages where the fracture due to crack should be considered in the design of these structures. In this paper, the finite volume method (FVM) is extended for the modeling of static and fatigue crack propagation for two-dimensional problems. In the present method, due to the crack growth, no global remeshing is needed where only a cell dividing near the crack tip can be used which is easy to implement during the analysis. The accuracy of the method is studied by solving several benchmark problems and the results are compared with the available analytical and numerical results. It is observed that the results are good in accuracy comparing with those found in the references.