A new approach to strong embedded discontinuities

In this paper, a new formulation for strong embedded discontinuities is introduced. The displacement jumps are obtained at additional nodes, located at the discontinuity surface. However, these nodes are not internal to the parent element as assumed in previous embedded formulations; instead, the new nodes and the corresponding degrees of freedom are global. In consequence: i) the jump displacement field no longer has to be homogeneous within each element and ii) the jump displacement field is continuous across element boundaries. The present formulation is compared with other approaches, namely the discrete approach with interface elements, other strong embedded discontinuity approaches and the partition of unity method. Simple examples are presented and compared with the results obtained from experiments and with some of the other formulations.