Product: ABAQUS/CAE
Benefits: The ability to define and analyze cracks in ABAQUS/CAE increases the coverage of ABAQUS fracture mechanics functionality.
Description: You can define an embedded seam with duplicate overlapping nodes, or you can define a crack in an existing region. You must choose the crack front, the crack tip or line, and the crack extension direction. You can use the crack definition to perform a contour integral analysis and to request history output of the 
-integral, 
-integral (for creep), stress intensity factors for both homogeneous materials and interfacial cracks, and 
-stress. If you request stress intensity factors, ABAQUS can also compute the crack propagation direction at initiation. If you are modeling a sharp crack with a small-strain analysis, you can model the singularity of the strain field along the crack front (see “Using the Edit Mesh toolset to adjust the position of midside nodes,” Section 13.10).
Figure 12–1 illustrates how ABAQUS/CAE computes successive contour integrals for a two-dimensional model by adding layers of elements surrounding the crack front.
If your part is three-dimensional, ABAQUS computes contour integrals at each node along the crack line, as shown in Figure 12–2.Interaction module: SpecialCrack
