Dependence of step size in the continuum strong discontinuity approach using the Boundary Element Method

The failure analysis in structures is extremely important since it allows to evaluate the safety degree and the integrity of structural systems. However, despite the increasing use of numerical methods in the study of material failures in the last years, the boundary element method is still little used when compared to domain methods. Thus, in this work it is analyzed the failure mechanics in some classical problems through the continuum strong discontinuity approach. In this way, it is used the implicit formulation of the boundary element method for nonlinear problems to shown the dependence of the step size when the cells with embedded discontinuity are generated only after step convergence or during any iteration, respectively, in the incremental-iterative process. For this purpose, the same problem was analyzed considering these two cases and also different numbers of steps. It was verified that the results are coincident for all numbers of steps considered in the simulations when cells are generated during any iteration, showing step size independence in this case, while the same is not true for the case of cells generated only after convergence, in which a large numbers of steps is required for well accuracy.