This paper presents the effect of cell based strain smoothing applied to enriched finite element method such as extended finite element method for solving two dimensional linear elastic fracture mechanics problems. Brief XFEM formulations and concept of strain smoothing applied to XFEM (SmXFEM) are presented. Strain smoothing simplifies the numerical integration of element stiffness matrix in the extended finite element method by converting the area integration into boundary integration and hence one dimensional Gaussian quadrature integration can be used to evaluate element stiffness matrix. Fracture analysis of structural components has been carried out and stress intensity factor (SIF), computed using domain form of interaction integral, obtained from strain smoothed extended finite element method (SmXFEM) and classical extended finite element method (XFEM) are compared with the analytical solutions available in the literature. Though the SIF obtained from SmXFEM and XFEM are in good agreement with that of SIF available in the literature, SmXFEM results depend upon the type of enrichment functions, number of subcells used for strain smoothing and order of one dimensional Gaussian quadrature used for boundary integration.

Keywords: Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM), Strain smoothing, Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM), Stress Intensity Factor (SIF).