KI evaluation using displacement etrapolation technique under adaptive dense mesh with parallel finite element

The work of Guinea et al. [1] on the influence of element size, element shape, and element mesh arrangement on numerical values of mode I stress intensity factor, I K determined by the displacement extrapolation technique (DET) is revisited and extended to some further. In this paper the three different DET configurations are tested along with the generation of very fine adaptive triangular finite element mesh. Since the resulted structural stiffness equation matrix is considerably large, it is solved using parallel processing. The processing procedure follows element-by-element approach using a pre-conjugate gradient solver. In addition, the evaluation is performed to a few more specimens to acquire thorough study on the configurations behaviors. Basically, the behaviors confirm the conclusions obtained by the previous study; nevertheless some unfamiliarities are observed which lead to a different strategy of obtaining the accurate K_I.