ABAQUS & Fracture Mechanics

shawn87411

I am curious if anyone here is familiar with ABAQUS and using it for crack propagation. I am doing a project on fatigue life and need to use a computer program (ABAQUS is our FEA) to predict fatigue life under specific loading conditions. I am planning to use crack propagation to do this and am wondering if ABAQUS has the ability to do this? I have never used the program so I guess I am curious what exactly can I get out of it if I have a CAD file to import and can specify the loading conditions. Thanks for your time.

PerennialII

It can with some limitations, the foremost being that using the "basic" methods (nodal release types) you need to pre-define the crack path and then you can use different criteria to drive the crack propagation during the analysis. Paris' law is one of them which might be of use. Some of the simpler techniques only work in 2D but the Paris law based on utilizing a VCCT (virtual crack closure technique) approach works in 3D as well.

Non - predefined crack paths can be accomplished by use of cohesive zone modeling (not meant for fatigue analyses in principle but can be tailored) where interface cohesive zone elements can be used to tear open new surface in a 3D space. Out of the non-research-like-software Abaqus performs fairly well, it's abilities are comparable to other similar software and in some cases (the typical comment about nonlinear performance here for example) exceed them.