An efficient parallel procedure for the simulation of crack growth using the cohesive surface methodology

Simulations of crack growth that arebase d on thecohe sivesurfaceme thodology typically involve ill-conditioned systems of equations and require much processing time. This paper shows how these systems of equations can be solved e#ciently by adopting the domain decomposition approach in which the ;nite element mesh is partitioned into multiple blocks. The system of equations is then reduced to a much smaller system of equations that is solved with an iterative algorithm in combination with a powerful two-level preconditioner. Although the solution algorithm is more e#cient than a direct solution algorithm on a single-processor computer, it becomes really attractive when used on a parallel computer. This is demonstrated for a large scale simulation of crack growth in a polymer using a Cray T3E with 64 processors