Local enrichment of NURBS patches using a non-intrusive coupling strategy: Geometric details, local refinement, inclusion, fracture

In this work, we apply a non-intrusive global/local coupling strategy for the modelling of local phenomena in a NURBS patch. The idea is to consider the NURBS patch to be enriched as the global model. This results in a simple, flexible strategy: first, the global NURBS patch remains unchanged, which completely eliminates the need for costly re-parametrization procedures (even if the local domain is expected to evolve); then, easy merging of a linear NURBS code with any other existing robust codes suitable for the modelling of complex local behaviour is possible. The price to pay is the number of iterations of the non-intrusive solver but we show that this can be strongly reduced by means of acceleration techniques. The main development for NURBS is to be able to handle non-conforming geometries. Only slight changes in the implementation process, including the setting up of suitable quadrature rules for the evaluation of the interface reaction forces, are made in response to this issue. A range of numerical examples in two-dimensional linear elasticity are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methodology and its significant potential to treat any case of local enrichment in a NURBS patch simply.