Performance of quarter-point boundary elements in analysing thermally stressed kinked and curved cracks (Q1365621)

The performance of quarter-point and traction-singular quarter-point boundary elements, dealing with kinked and curved thermal cracks, is investigated. These special crack-tip elements simulate correctly the \(r^{1/2}\) and \(r^{-1/2}\) near-tip behavior of temperature/displacement and heat flux/thermal stress fields, respectively. The well-known displacement and traction-based formulas are generalized for any crack configuration and used for the evaluation of heat flux and mixed-mode thermal stress intensity factors. The two-dimensional stationary thermoelasticity problem is solved via the boundary-only element method, through which volume discretization is completely eliminated. It is demonstrated by the conducted numerical experiments that present results converge to the exact ones, obtained from the literature, when the crack-tip element size tends to zero.