An XFEM plate element for high gradient zones resulted from yield lines

SUMMARY A high gradient of displacement field occurs when a yield line is formed in a plate with elasto‐plastic material. For such applications, the extended finite element method has shown to be an effective numerical method to capture the behavior of a plate with a locally nonsmooth displacement field, and a displacement field with a high gradient. In this article, a six‐node isoparametric plate element with extended finite element method formulation is presented to capture the elasto‐plastic behavior of a plate in small‐deformation analyses. The Hermite function is adopted at the element level to enrich both the translational and the rotational displacement approximation fields so that nonsmoothness in displacement fields near a yield line can be simulated. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.