on the application of element free galerkin method in stress intensity factor evaluation of functionally graded plates

stress-intensity factors (sifs) are the most important parameters in fracture mechanics analysis of structures. these parameters are evaluated for a stationary crack in functionally graded plates of arbitrary geometry using a novel galerkin based mesh-free method. the method involves an element-free galerkin method (efgm), where the material properties are smooth functions of spatial coordinates and two newly developed interaction integrals for mixed-mode fracture analysis. numerical examples for mode-i fracture problems are presented to evaluate the accuracy of sifs calculated by the proposed efgm. comparisons have been made between the sifs predicted by efgm and available reference solutions in the literature, generated either analytically or by fem using various other fracture integrals or analyses. a good agreement is obtained between the results of the proposed meshless method and the reference solutions.