• Computers and Concrete
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.99-117
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• 2023

The crack under the influence of the higher intensities of the stresses grows and the structure gets collapsed with the time when the crack length reaches to critical value. Therefore, the fracture behavior of a structure in terms of stress intensity factors (SIF) becomes important to determine the remaining fracture strength and capacity of material and structure for avoiding catastrophic failure, increasing safety and further improvement in the design. The robustness of the method has been demonstrated by comparing the numerical results with analytical and experimental results of some problems. XFEM is used to model cracks and holes in structures and predict their strength and reliability under service conditions. Further, XFEM is extended with a stochastic method for predicting the sensitivity in terms of output COVs and fracture strength in terms of mean values of stress intensity factors (SIFs) of a structure with discontinuities (cracks and holes) under tensile loading condition with input individual and combined randomness in different system parameters. In stochastic technique, the second order perturbation technique (SOPT) has been used for the predicting the fracture behavior of the structures. The stochastic/perturbation technique is also known as Taylor series expansion method and it provides the reliable results if the input randomness is less than twenty percentage. From the present numerical analysis it is observed that, the crack tip near to the hole is under the influence of the stress concentration and the variational effect of the input random parameters on the crack tip in terms of the SIFs are lesser so the COVs are the less sensitive. The COVs of mixed mode SIFs are the most sensitive for the crack angles (α=45° to 90°) for all the values of c₁ and d₁. The plate with the shorter distance between hole and crack is the most sensitive with all the crack angles but the crack tip which is much nearer to the hole has the highest sensitivity.