Stable 3D extended finite elements with higher order enrichment for accurate non planar fracture

We present an extended finite element method (XFEM) for 3D nonplanar linear elastic fracture. The new approach not only provides optimal convergence using geometrical enrichment but also enables to contain the increase in conditioning number characteristic of enriched finite element formulations: the number of iterations to convergence of the conjugate gradient solver scales similarly to and converges faster than the topologically-enriched version of the standard XFEM. This has two advantages: (1) the residual can be driven to zero to machine precision for at least 50% fewer iterations than the standard version of XFEM; (2) additional enrichment functions can be added without significant deterioration of the conditioning. Numerical examples also show that our new approach is up to 40% more accurate in terms of stress intensity factors, than the standard XFEM