Hi,
thanks for your reply.
So the crack is in the fillet weld, and in this case, i think the x-axis is pointed in the right direction. In this picture you see the situation from another angle, and without the top plate.
There is only a “bonded contact” between the fillet weld and the “brown” plate.
The mesh size for all bodies is 2.5 mm, and looks like this:
and the mesh of the crack looks like this (without plate):
The parameters of the crack are:
Growth factor: 1,2
Element size at crack front: 0,1mm
with 6 contours.
The deformation of the system looks like this. The blue arrow is the applied Load, and i marked the crack red.
In the following picture, you can see a section plane through the crack with the von mises stress distribution. One thing i observed was, that even though i defined a bounded contact between the plate and the fillet weld, it seems like there is a gap between those two bodies at some parts. How can that be ?