Analysis of Cracked Body Strengthened by Adhesively Bonded Patches by BEM-FEM Coupling

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient numerical technique capable of handling the stress analysis of three-dimensional cracked bodies strengthened by adhesively bonded patches. The proposed technique is implemented within the framework of the coupling of the weakly singular boundary integral equation method and the standard finite element procedure. The former is applied to efficiently treat the elastic body containing cracks, whereas the latter is adopted to handle both the adhesive layers and patches. The approximation of the near-front relative crack-face displacement is enhanced by using local interpolation functions that can capture the right asymptotic behavior. This also offers the direct calculation of the stress intensity factors along the crack front. A selected set of results is reported to demonstrate the capability of the proposed technique and the influence of various parameters on the performance of the strengthening.