A Study on Phase-Field Models for Brittle Fracture

arXiv1805.07357MaRDI QIDQ6301796FDOQ6301796

Authors: F. Zhang, Weizhang Huang, Xianping Li, Shicheng Zhang 

Publication date: 18 May 2018

Abstract: In the phase-field modeling of brittle fracture, anisotropic constitutive assumptions for the degradation of stored elastic energy due to fracture are crucial to preventing cracking in compression and obtaining physically sound numerical solutions. Three energy decomposition models, the spectral decomposition, the volumetric-deviatoric split, and an improved volumetric-deviatoric split, and their effects on the performance of the phase-field modeling are studied. Meanwhile, anisotropic degradation of stiffness may lead to a small energy remaining on crack surfaces, which violates crack boundary conditions and can cause unphysical crack openings and propagation. A simple yet effective treatment for this is proposed: define a critically damaged zone with a threshold parameter and then degrade both the active and passive energies in the zone. A dynamic mesh adaptation finite element method is employed for the numerical solution of the corresponding elasticity system. Four examples, including two benchmark ones, one with complex crack systems, and one based on an experimental setting, are considered. Numerical results show that the spectral decomposition and improved volumetric-deviatoric split models, together with the improvement treatment of crack boundary conditions, can lead to crack propagation results that are comparable with the existing computational and experimental results. It is also shown that the numerical results are not very sensitive to the parameter defining the critically damaged zone.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Numerical interpolation (65D05) Numerical computation of solutions to systems of equations (65H10) Mesh generation, refinement, and adaptive methods for the numerical solution of initial value and initial-boundary value problems involving PDEs (65M50) Finite element, Rayleigh-Ritz and Galerkin methods for initial value and initial-boundary value problems involving PDEs (65M60) Nonlinear elasticity (74B20) Nonlinear constitutive equations for materials with memory (74D10) Brittle damage (74R05) Brittle fracture (74R10)

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