An improved stress recovery technique for the unfitted finite element analysis of discontinuous gradient fields

Stress analysis is an all-pervasive practice in engineering design. With displacement-based finite element analysis, directly-calculated stress fields are obtained a post-processing step by computing the gradient of displacement field—therefore less accurate. In enriched (EFEA), which provides unprecedented versatility decoupling mesh from material interfaces, cracks, and structural boundaries, recovery further aggravated when such discontinuities get arbitrarily close to nodes mesh; presence small area integration elements often yields overestimated stresses, could have detrimental impact on nonlinear analyses (e.g., damage or plasticity) since concentrations just nonphysical numerical artifact. this article, we propose procedure for enhancing field problems where discontinuous. The formulation based improvement (SIP) initially proposed low-order standard elements. Although generally applicable all EFEA, investigate technique with Interface-enriched Generalized Finite Element Method compare other smoothing techniques. We demonstrate that SIP EFEA enhanced more accurate than stresses—even compared FEM fitted meshes.