3. Modeling A

3.1. Characteristics of modeling

Method SIMPLEXE is used by PROPA_FISS.

3.2. Characteristics of the mesh

The structure is modelled by a mesh composed of 6720 elements HEXA8 (see).

Figure 3.2-a : structure mesh

The mesh is not very refined to reduce computation time. The size of the elements is uniform and equal to \(0.29\mathrm{\times }0.33\mathrm{\times }0.25m\).

3.3. Tested sizes and results

We extract the normal (\(\mathrm{LSN}\)) and tangent (\(\mathrm{LST}\)) level set using the POST_RELEVE_T operator using the operator and we check that the maximum and minimum values remain included in the capture circle of the nodes tested around the crack front, i.e. \(2/3\):

\(\mathrm{Propag.}i\)	\(\mathrm{Max}{\mathrm{LSN}}_{i}\)	\(\mathrm{Min}{\mathrm{LSN}}_{i}\)		\(\mathrm{Max}{\mathrm{LST}}_{i}\)	\(\mathrm{Min}{\mathrm{LST}}_{i}\)
3	0.233	0.40	0.40	0.33	0.28

The results obtained clearly show that the level-sets remain less than the radius in which the crack front was located. This means that the crack bottom has been correctly located by method SIMPLEXE.