Singular plastic element: NASTRAN implementation and application

The elastic and plastic singularities near a crack tip are obtained from higher order isoparametric elements. This is simply accomplished by collapsing the quadrilateral element into the triangular element and by judicious choice of adjacent mid-side nodes. Specifically for the cubic element the elastic singularity is obtained by placing the mid-side nodes adjacent to the crack tip at 1/9th and 4/9th locations. The plastic singularity is constructed using the sliding node concept. These elements have been implemented in NASTRAN as user dummy elements.