You use the SMART Crack Growth object to simulate fatigue or static crack growth in engineering structures. SMART is a remeshing-based method for crack growth simulation. SMART stands for Separating, Morphing, Adaptive, and Remeshing Technology. SMART automatically uses a combination of morphing, adaptive, and remeshing methods to update mesh changes to simulate static or fatigue crack growth during the solution process. The mesh changes occur around the crack-front region only, leading to a computationally efficient solution of the crack-growth problem.
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Recommendation: When you define SMART Crack Growth, the application stores fracture results for time points based on the setting of the Analysis Settings > Output Controls property Store Results At.
Important: If the Store Results At property is not set to the option, the Crack Extension and Total Number of Cycles probe results will not be accurate. This is because these values are derived from the summation of results stored in the results file instead of the summation of results over all solved sub-steps. Therefore, Ansys recommends that you set the Store Results At property to for accurate Crack Extension and Total Number of Cycles probe results. Furthermore, Ansys recommends that you use this property to specify time points, even if you issue additional OUTRES commands through the Commands (APDL) object.
Note:
For additional technical information on this feature, refer to the SMART Method for Crack-Growth Simulation section in the Mechanical APDL Fracture Analysis Guide.
For specific information about the properties of the object, see the SMART Crack Growth object reference page.
For a video example of the feature, see the Fatigue Crack Growth Analysis using SMART Crack Growth Tutorial.