Extended Finite-Element Method for Electric Field Analysis of Insulating Plate With Crack

In this paper, the extended finite-element method (XFEM) is employed to analyze electric field of insulating plate with crack. To begin with, both the approximation of XFEM and features of the enrichment functions for crack tip are presented. Then, XFEM is used to solve electric potential of an insulating plate with a middle crack, which proves the method can save computational time by comparison with classic finite-element method (CFEM) under the same computational accuracy. In addition, XFEM is also applied to calculate electrical field at crack tip of an insulating plate with an edge crack, which reveals that the relative error between XFEM and CFEM is small when the meshing size of CFEM around crack tip is smaller than that of XFEM. Therefore, electric field analysis of discontinuous and singular solutions can demonstrate the superior performance of XFEM.