Smoothed extended finite element method for thermally stressed solids with strong discontinuities

The salient feature of the strain smoothing technique is that by choosing an appropriate smoothing function and invoking divergence theorem, the domain integral is transformed into boundary integral. This greatly simplifies the numerical integration of the bilinear form. Moreover, it does not require the derivatives of the shape functions and thus eliminating the isoparametric mapping. In this paper, the recently proposed linear smoothed extended finite element method is extended to solve thermally stressed solids containing internal discontinuities such as cracks. Both the displacement and the temperature field is augmented with additional functions to capture the local behaviour. The thermal stress intensity factors (SIFs) are computed by employing the domain form of the ./-integral. The accuracy is demonstrated with a few benchmark problems and it can be concluded that the proposed method yields similar order of accuracy when compared to the extended finite element method but at relatively low computational effort.