Simulation study on the fracture behavior of metallic materials subjected to short-duration electro-thermal loads

A pre-crack metallic conductor affected by intense impulsive current and mechanical load would have a series of experimental phenomena such as crack propagation, localized melting, and cavity growth. Hence, on the basis of the fracture mechanics theory and the extended finite element method (XFEM), we proposed a numerical method for multi-physical field decoupling analysis, in which crack growth was simulated by XFEM in ABAQUS and the direct coupling and load transfer approaches were used to simulate the interaction between multi-physical fields. We applied the method to simulate the dynamic damage behavior of a specimen with pre-crack, such as crack propagation, change of temperature field on crack tip, and cavity growth. The simulation results agree with experiment results well in aspects of crack growth length and molten hole radius, verifying that the proposed numerical method is effective.