The Study of Fracture Behavior of Moving Silica Glasses under Transient Temperature Variations Arising from Heterogeneous Surrounding Fluid, Using XFEM

In this study, to present a formulation framework for thermal crack growth problems with moving boundaries, a cracked silica glass plate moving in a heterogeneous fluid has been investigated, using the extended finite element method (XFEM). For this purpose, the transient heat conduction with moving boundaries and simultaneously, convective heat transfer of moving boundaries with different ambient fluids, is formulated using XFEM and a system of transient heat conducting matrix equation is obtained. Furthermore, to accurately compute the temperature fields, by adjusting the Crank-Nicolson scheme and using the Von Neumann stability criterion, a numerical solution has been presented for the above-mentioned system. The formulation procedure has been coded in Matlab and it has been employed. In order to analyze the performance of the presented formulation, giving the mechanical and thermal properties for the soda-lime glass, obtained results are compared and verified with the experimental ones. After accuracy verification of results, the aforementioned process has been accomplished for other common silica glasses and the effects of thermal and mechanical properties of them has been analyzed on mode I stress intensity factor.