Numerical prediction of plastic zone length in straight edge cracked plate using XFEM

This Paper combines the Dugdale’s Approach with Extended finite element method (XFEM) in order to estimate the Plastic zone length (PZL) for a straight edge cracked plate (SECP) under uniaxial tensile loading condition. Dugdale utilized a different approach to evaluate the PZL by nullifying the effect of singularity at the tip of the virtually extended crack by the applying a uniform pressure which is equal to the yielding stress. XFEM is utilized for analyzing SECP as it is more efficient and accurate as compared to other conventional numerical tools. In XFEM, crack can be extended without any re-meshing because elements near crack interface need not to conform the crack geometry.PZL for SECP is evaluated for crack length, a, varying in the range of 0.01 to 0.05 (m) in steps of 0.01 and load intensity (σ₀/Y) ranging from 0.1 to 0.5 in steps of 0.1. Crack Position (h/H) is also varied ranging from 0 to 0.8 in step of 0.2 in order to analyse its effect on PZL. MATLAB is employed for Extended Finite element analysis of SECP under Plane stress condition. Four node Quadrilateral elementsare used for extended finite element analysis. The numerical results are validated by the experimental results from the available literature.