A Study on Phase-Field Models for Brittle Fracture
For researchers in computational fracture mechanics, this work offers an incremental improvement to phase-field models by fixing unphysical crack behavior, but the novelty is limited as it combines known methods with a minor modification.
This study investigates three energy decomposition models for phase-field brittle fracture and proposes a simple treatment to enforce crack boundary conditions, achieving crack propagation results comparable to existing computational and experimental benchmarks with low sensitivity to the new parameter.
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.