Near-tip grid refinement for the effective and reliable natural element crack analysis

This paper intends to introduce a near-tip grid refinement and to explore its usefulness in the crack analysis by the natural element method (NEM). As a sort of local h-refinement in FEM, a NEM grid is locally refined around the crack tip showing the high stress singularity. This local grid refinement is completed in two steps in which grid points are added and Delaunay triangles sharing the crack tip node are divided. A plane-state plate with symmetric edge cracks is simulated to validate the proposed local grid refinement and to examine its usefulness in the crack analysis. The crack analysis is also simulated using a uniform NEM grid for the sake of comparison. The near-tip stress distributions and SIFs that are obtained using a near-tip refined NEM grid are compared with the exact values and those obtained using uniform NEM grid. The convergence rates of global relative error to the total number of grid points between the refined and non-refined NEM grids are also compared.