STABILITY OF DYNAMIC GROWTH OF TWO ANTI-SYMMETRIC CRACKS USING PDS-FEM

This paper studies the stability of dynamic crack growth in a homogeneous body, carrying out a numerical experiment of a plate with two anti-symmetric cracks. PDS-FEM proposed by the authors is extended to dynamic state and used in the numerical experiment. It is shown that while a common process is not found for the crack growth, there are two dominant patterns for the final crack configuration. The first pattern is anti-symmetric, indicating the stability of the homogeneous body solution, and the second pattern is not anti-symmetric, suggesting that the solution becomes unstable. It is also shown that higher loading rate tends to shift the crack configuration to the second pattern, losing the stability of the solution.