Application of PDS-FEM for Simulating 3D Wing Crack Growth

3D wing crack growth is not a well understood phenomenon, although it is one of the key mechanisms of the failure of brittle materials under compression. Using PDS-FEM, we simulated the growth of 3D wing cracks emerging from pre-existing cracks in blocks of brittle linear elastic solids, under compression. The complex 3D wing crack profiles are reproduced with PDS-FEM, which uses non-overlapping shape functions of conjugate geometries to approximate functions and their derivatives. PDS-FEM provides numerically efficient failure treatment for modeling 3D cracks, making use of the numerous discontinuities in the approximated displacement field. Large scale models with several million elements are used to reproduce the experimentally observed details of wing crack profiles. The bending of crack surfaces at the tip of mode-I regions, extension of wing cracks and the growth of tensile openings or petal cracks at mode-III regions are reproduced, demonstrating the applicability of PDS-FEM for studying 3D wing crack growth phenomena.