USING MOVING LEAST SQUARES APPROXIMATION FUNCTION IN THE FINITE VOLUME METHOD FOR THE CALCULATION OF THE STRESS INTENSITY FACTOR OF THE CRACKED BENDING

Due to cyclic nature of applied pressure on engineering structures like airplane fuselages, storage tanks, and ship hulls, members evolving the through crack, results in the sudden failure; so-called as fatigue fracture. Investigation of this type of fracture is an important issue for a successful design of these structures. On the other hand, the finite volume method (FVM) as a well-known method in the computational mechanics, is found as a powerful method for the bending analysis of beams and plates, with no matter of thickness varies from very thin to moderately thick beams and plates. Usually in this method, according to the classic approximation of the field variables, the displacement at a favorite point on the face of control volume is approximated linearly in terms of displacement of cell centers adjacent to that face. However, accuracy of the approximation can be increased by using of the higher-order approximation techniques like Moving Least Squares (MLS) approximation which is well suited in the mesh free methods. In this research the MLS approximation is used in the finite volume method, and the Reissner plate with a through-the-thickness crack (through crack) is analyzed for the computation of the stress intensity factors (SIFs) at the crack tip. First, the influence of the size of support domain as one of the key parameter of the MLS approximation is investigated. By using of the obtained value of the support domain size, the SIF values of several benchmark cracked plates are calculated. The obtained results compared with the values obtained by the other analytical and numerical methods presented in literature where good agreement can be seen. These comparisons indicate the capability of the presented FVM for studying of the cracked plates. Furthermore, the size of support domain found in this research can be considered as the convenient values for the FVM analysis of cracked plate in the future researches.