Computation of SIFs for cracked FGMs under mechanical and thermal loadings

Abstract The objective of this study is to present a numerical modeling of mixed-mode fracture in isotropic functionally graded materials (FGMs), under mechanical and thermal loading conditions. In this paper, a modified displacement extrapolation technique (DET) was proposed to calculate the stress intensity factor (SIFs) for isotropic FGMs. Using the Ansys Parametric Design Language APDL, the continuous variations of the material properties are incorporated by specified parameters at the centroid of each element. Three numerical examples are presented to evaluate the accuracy of SIFs calculated by the proposed method. Comparisons have been made between the SIFs predicted by the DET and the available reference solutions in the current literature. A good agreement is obtained between the results of the DET and the reference solutions.