Abstract
The FE-simulation of ductile fracture processes for discrete crack propagation using nodal release approach is well established for modelling crack in metal sheet. In this method, the crack is assumed to initiate or propagate along the element edges, hence, this way new crack boundary is generated in the FE mesh. Therefore, when a critical value of fracture criterion is reached at a node then that particular node is duplicated having same initial co-ordinates, and hence under subsequent load increment a new crack is generated in the FE-mesh, thus, this way crack is extended by one or more element length per increment. Therefore, in this paper, a FEM model is presented with an attempt to model ductile fracture using the nodal release approach, which is implemented in commercial FE software – MSC.Marc® together with predefined user-subroutines. Consequently, the ability of this approaches to predict the blanked edge profile are analysed and compared with micrograph from experiments.