State of the Art – 3D Crack Growth Simulation
The FRacture ANalysis Code 3D (FRANC3D) program is designed to simulate 3D crack growth in engineering structures where the component geometry, local loading conditions, and the evolutionary crack geometry can be arbitrarily complex. It is designed to be used as a companion to general purpose Finite Element (FE) solvers.
FRANC3D development started at Cornell University in the late 1980’s, evolving into a program that has been used worldwide in academia and industry for analyzing crack growth in complex 3D structures.
Unique Capabilities
- FRANC3D Computes the stress intensity factors associated with all three “modes” of fracture for the mid-side nodal points along the crack front
- FRANC3D is the only available code which computes M-Integral & J-Integral
- FRANC3D is the only available code that will compute stress intensity factors for generally anisotropic materials
- FRANC3D Is the only available code that computes Crack nucleation due to fretting right at the edge of the contact region and grows along the edge of contact, FRANC3D is the ONLY code can handle this type of problems
User Specific Flaw Insertion
only available code which computes M-Integral & J-Integral
Only Code for Isotropic, Anisotropic ,Orthotropic Material Fracture
only available code that computes Crack nucleation due to fretting
Realistic Life Assessment with error less than 0.5%
Real Crack Surface Geometry can be used as Flaw
FRANC3D has had a long development history starting in the late 1980’s at Cornell University. The FRANC3D/Classic software is still available from the Cornell Fracture Group, but it is no longer supported and will not run on many current platforms as it is restricted to 32bit and XWindows graphics. An all new version of FRANC3D was started in 2005 and commercial licensed copies have been shipping since 2010. The development history is shown here:
