Development of super element to perform direct analysis on failure assessment of hull structures based on FAD

Failure assessment diagram (FAD) has great potentials to be a powerful tool to assess the integrity of hull structures. However, the current methodology to obtain the fracture ratio and the load ratio, two axes of FAD, for hull structures is tedious and burden which is one of the major obstacles to advance the further application of FAD. In this paper, a super element is introduced to obtain those two ratios simultaneously in the framework of linear elastic analysis within a single step. Besides, the virtual section closure technique is proposed to compute the reference stress under the inspiration of virtual crack closure technique to compute the stress intensity factor. The capacity of the proposed super element has been assessed by two classic examples of a plate with central crack and a cylinder with circumferential crack. The results obtained from the super element are compared to the corresponding analytical solutions. Finally, the cracked Nishihara specimen (NST-3) was examined and the facture ratio and the load ratio obtained by the super element were compared to those obtained by the global analyses. The comparisons indicate that the proposed super element is accurate. No convergence troubles were encountered. Therefore, the methodology developed in this paper could be a very useful addition to perform the direct analysis on the failure of hull structures due to large crack extensions based on the failure assessment diagram.