Modified Crack Closure Based Evaluation of Stress Intensity Factor in Symmetric Multi-Zone Curved Galerkin Boundary Element

The Boundary Element method (BEM) is a well established numerical tool for computation of stress intensity factors (SIFs) with a good degree of accuracy. The displacement based boundary element methods have been used with success for determination of SIF's. Another important method for determining SIF is based on a crack closure technique(CCI). This technique has been used by several investigators to determine the SIF by Finite Element techniques. There have been some recent efforts to analyze SIF's in Boundary element technique by this method. However, the boundary element techniques that were used are based on the traditional collocation based approach. In this work the symmetric Galerkin multi-zone boundary element approach is extended to be used along with a modified crack-closure integral based approach for stress-intensity factor calculations.