Large-scale simulation of crack propagation based on continuum damage mechanics and two-step mesh partitioning

In this paper, the damage and crack propagation is numerically simulated based on continuum damage mechanics, and the parallel computing technique is utilized for the accurate analysis through the large-scale structural model. Besides the increase of computing burden resulted from the large-scale model, the complexity of the damage model, which involves highly nonlinear effects, increases the quantity of computation. Therefore, the high performance computing power is obtained from the Departmental Computing Grid (DCG) system composed of PC computers in our laboratory. The methodology of DCG is described and a new two-step mesh-partitioning scheme based on the graph-partitioning method is suggested to enhance the load balancing for parallel finite element analysis in the DCG environment. In the two-step mesh-partitioning scheme, the system performance weights are calculated to reflect the effect of heterogeneous system performances and weighted edge and vertex method (WEVM) is adopted to minimize the increase of communications. Based on these circumstances, damage distribution and crack initiation in an edge-cracked plate under Mode-I, -II, -III loading and fuselage structure in tension are analyzed by more than one million degrees of freedom. The possibility of the utilization of Grid computing system can be also addressed from the numerical results.