The Computation of Bounds for the Exact Energy Release Rates in Linear Fracture Mechanics

We present an a-posteriori method for computing rigorous upper and lower bounds of the J-integral in two dimensional linear elasticity. The J-integral, which is typically expressed as a contour integral, is recast as a surface integral which yields a quadratic continuous functional of the displacement. By expanding the quadratic output about an approximate finite element solution, the output is expressed as a known computable quantity plus linear and quadratic functionals of the solution error. The quadratic component is bounded by the energy norm of the error scaled by a continuity constant, which is determined explicitly. The linear component is expressed as an inner product of the errors in the displacement and in a computed adjoint solution, and bounded using standard a-posteriori error estimation techniques. The method is illustrated with two fracture problems in plane strain elasticity. An important feature of the method presented is that the computed bounds are rigorous with respect to the weak solution of the elasticity equation.