T-Stress Evaluation Based Cracking of Pipes Using an Extended Isogeometric Analysis (X-IGA)

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the problem of pipe cracking based on T-stress analysis and the influence of other parameters, using a numerical computation performed by extended isogeometric analysis (X-IGA). This article examines the T-stress, which defines the second term of the Williams’ series expansion. T-stress provides effective elastic modeling at the crack tip. Using the extended iso-geometric analysis (X-IGA), we determined the distribution of T-stress at the crack tip in a pipe under internal pressure as a function of internal pressure, crack size, and Poisson’s ratio. To validate the promising findings, the results are expanded with a comparison to the extended finite element (X-FEM) method and existing research in this field, and we obtained an error between 0.2% and 4.6%. This work demonstrated the significance of T-stress in fracture description, the effect of Poisson’s ratio and size on T-stress, and that X-IGA provided accurate numerical results by precisely describing the geometry of the crack and enriching it.