A Fluid-Structure Coupled Computational Framework for Fluid-Induced Failure and Fracture

This work extends and generalizes a recently developed fluid-structure coupled computational framework to model and simulate fluid-induced failure and fracture. In particular, a novel surface representation approach is proposed to represent a fractured fluid-structure interface in the context of embedded boundary method. This approach is generic in the sense that it is applicable to many different computational fracture models and methods, including the element deletion (ED) technique and the extended finite element method (XFEM). Two three-dimensional model problems are presented to demonstrate the salient features of the computational framework, and to compare the performance of ED and XFEM in the context of fluid-induced failure and fracture.