Phase Field Modeling of Fracture in Multi-Field Environments

Analysis of crack propagation in brittle and ductile materials has been a topic of intensive research during the last years to predict failure mechanisms for various engineering applications. Machining, cutting and forming of materials are at the core of automobile, aerospace, medical fields, bridges or heavy industries. These applications can significantly benefit from a precisely predictive computational tool to model fracture behavior in the design phase of products.

The phase field approach to fracture has been proven to be a very powerful technique to simulate crack phenomena in multi-physical environments. It regularizes sharp crack surfaces within a pure continuum setting by a specific gradient damage modeling with constitutive terms rooted in fracture mechanics.

At IKM, latest developments related to the phase-field models for cracking in complex materials will be investigated using the software tool AceGen program in the numerical implementation to compute the unknown fields. Of particular interest are problems related to brittle-to-ductile failure mode transition, crack propagation in inelastic solids, fatigue phenomena and cracking at multi-scales all based on virtual/finite element methods.

On the computational side, one may employ either a monolithic or a staggered algorithm to compute the unknowns. Herein, a robust and efficient monolithic scheme is employed in the numerical implementation using the software tool AceGen.