An anisotropic damage model combined with a tracking algorithm for modelling crack propagation

Abstract

The development of a simple and efficient methodologies for numerically analyzing the material fracture process is very important in the field of computational mechanics. Damage mechanics approaches are still applied to fracture numerical analyses of many engineering practice problems. This paper focuses on the numerical prediction of crack propagation and fracture behavior by the combination of anisotropic damage model and tracking algorithm. In general, anisotropic damage models may be misunderstood to be used only in the simulations of anisotropic materials. However, it can be used for the anisotropic stiffness matrix induced by the crack plane in damaged isotropic materials. Although it is well known that the anisotropic damage model is superior to the isotropic damage model in fracture simulations, most of studies have combined the isotropic damage model and tracking algorithm, and few studies combine the anisotropic damage model and tracking algorithm. The issues of successfully combining the anisotropic damage model and crack tracking algorithm are addressed in this study. The anisotropic damage model is improved and a local tracking algorithm based on crack surface discretization is also modified. Various crack propagation problems are analyzed numerically to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.