Hello,

The aim of this writting is to give a brief introduction to the eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM) and investigation of its practical applications.

Firstly introduced in 1999 by the work of Black and Belytschko, XFEM is a local partition of unity (PUM) enriched finite element method. By local, it means that only a region near the discontinuties such as cracks, holes, material interfaces are enriched. The most important concept in this method is "enrichment" which means that the displacement approximation is enriched (incorporated) by additional problem-specific functions. For example, for crack modelling, the Heaviside function is used to enrich nodes whose support cut by the crack face whereas the near tip asymptotic functions are used to model the crack tip singularity (nodes whose support containes the tip are enriched).