Remeshing techniques for r-adaptive and combined h/r-adaptive analysis with application to 2D/3D crack propagation

Remeshing strategies are formulated for r-adaptive and h/r-adaptive analysis of crack propaga-tion.The relocation of the nodes, which typifies r-adaptivity, is a very cheap method to optimise a givendiscretisation since the element connectivity remains unaltered. However, the applicability is limited. Tofurther improve the finite element mesh, a combined h/r-adaptive method is proposed in which h-adaptivityis applied whenever r-adaptivity is not capable of further improving the discretisation. Two andthree-dimensional examples are presented. It is shown that the r-adaptive approach can optimise adiscretisation at minimal computational costs. Further, the combined h/r-adaptive approach improves theperformance of a fully r-adaptive technique while the number of h-remeshings is reduced compared to afully h-adaptive technique.