Enhanced XFA3D for Fatigue Crack Growth and Life Prediction in Aluminum Structures

A Three-Dimensional extended finite element method for the Abaqus finite element package (XFA3D) is developed and implemented for curvilinear fatigue crack growth and life prediction analysis of metallic structures. Given the presence of a relatively large plastic zone and the 3D crack growth behavior in a large scale aluminum structure, an advanced integration scheme along with a narrow band approach has been developed in the X-FEM framework with a level set description of initial and moving cracks. The proposed technique allows arbitrary insertion of initial cracks, independent of a base 3D model, and allows nonself-similar crack growth pattern without conforming to the existing mesh or local remeshing. The tool has shown its great potential to be used in various designs and analysis practices such as illustrated in the examples.

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