An extended element-free Galerkin method for thermo-mechanical dynamic fracture in linear and nonlinear materials

In this manuscript, an extended element-free Galerkin (XEFG) method for dynamic thermo-mechanical fracture is proposed. The crack is considered adiabatic and the discontinuous displacement field and temperature field is modeled by partition-of-unity enrichment of the test and trial functions. The coupled thermo-mechanical formulation is implemented for static and dynamic problems and applied to fracture in composite structures in two dimension. The method is verified through comparison to analytical and experimental results. Where available, the results are also compared to reference solutions. The proposed method models thermo-mechanical efficiently and robustly with few degrees of freedom. Therefore, an h-adaptive refinement procedure is employed that inserts nodes based on the temperature gradient.