Perpustakaan Digital ITB

Fracture mechanics is the field that studies the formation and propagation of crack in material. A crack could form in almost every material. Crack formation is usually an undesirable phenomenon. In many cases, a crack is very harmless. However in some situation, it could lead to a fatal incident. Therefore, research in fracture mechanics need to be continuously developed. One way to analyze a crack is by determining the strain energy release rate parameter. The strain energy release rate is the energy that is used up during fracture formation per fracture surface area. The strain energy release rate could be calculated using the virtual crack extension or the virtual crack closure technique methods. In this paper, both virtual crack extension and the virtual crack closure technique are applied to obtain the strain energy release rate of an even loaded cracked plate with fixed boundary. For the simulation, the author varies the element size, the crack length, and the plate thickness. The results show that the virtual crack closure technique method tend to gives more accurate outcome. The strain energy release rate tends to increase as the crack length increases but decreases as the plate gets thicker.