Modeling of Discontinuities by Enriched Techniques

The modeling of different discontinuities such as cracks, contact surfaces, holes and bi-material interfaces in the conventional finite element framework is very difficult because of the requirements of conformal meshing and mesh refinement. The finite element method faces several issues while handling evolving discontinuities because re-meshing of the domain is required regularly during analysis. Over the last few years, the enriched techniques, such as the extended finite element method (XFEM) and the element free Galerkin method (EFGM), have found wide application in the modeling of cracks, holes and other bi-material discontinuities. This book provides the fundamentals of several enriched techniques that were developed in the recent times for modeling different types of discontinuities. The modeling of discontinuities by extended finite element method, element free Galerkin method and coupled FE-EFGM is provided in this book. The fundamentals of the level set method are also presented in detail.