A finite volume simulation of electrical potential drop in 2D cracked plates

Abstract

The electric potential drop technique is an effective crack monitoring method, especially in harsh environment conditions. With this method, the calibration curve, the relationship between potential drop across the crack and the crack sizes, is needed. This work applied a cell-centered finite volume discretisation with unstructured quadrilateral mesh to simulate the potential drop within cracked specimens. The numerical model is implemented with C++ language. The program was used to simulate electric potential drop in 2D specimens with the two most common through-thickness crack problems, the single edge crack and central crack types with the crack length to specimen width ratios from 0.1 to 0.8. The resulting calculated calibration curves conform well with the analytical solutions.