A planar fracture when subjected to sufficient tensile and shear stresses will propagate off-plane, known as mixed-mode propagation. Predicting the fracture path relies on the propagation criteria. The criterion we present scales the propagation magnitude and direction with the near-tip tensile stress in form of vectors that originate from the fracture tip-line. Boundary element method (BEM) enables us to calculate the near-tip stress field of an arbitrary fracture. We feed the near-tip stress to the propagation criterion to determine the propagation vectors. We grow the BEM mesh by adding new tip-elements whose size and orientation are given by the propagation vectors. Then, we feed the new mesh back to BEM to calculate the new near-tip stress. By running BEM and the propagation criterion in a loop, we are able to model 3D fracture propagation. We use analytical Eshelby's solution that evaluates near-tip stress of an ellipsoidal fracture to validate the BEM results.
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