This paper focusses on the calculation of leak rates for leak-before-break assessments but using a new finite element tool. The new tool was developed to help investigate the effect of crack closure due to a leaking thermo-fluid heating the crack walls. The hypothesis is that as bulk fluid temperature increases, crack opening area will reduce and make leak rate calculations which ignore temperature effects non-conservative. The new element is built using the extended finite element method, which is a new meshless method in finite elements based on the partition of unity method. The investigation into the thermo-mechanical closure effect when a fluid leaks through a crack is presented, where the extended finite element method is the modelling scheme adopted for this, and the application of heat flux and pressure jump conditions along the crack is one of the novel contributions of this work. By modelling the fluid as one dimensional steady state and obtaining a heat transfer coefficient, it is shown here that coupling the fluid with the structure is possible all within a single element.

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