Recent Advances in Simulating Failure Evolution with the Material Point Method

Abstract

To predict a complete process of failure evolution, discontinuous bifurcation analysis has been performed to link elastoplasticity and damage models with decohesion models. To simulate multi-phase interactions involving failure evolution, the Material Point Method (MPM) has been developed to discretize localized large deformations and the transition from continuous to discontinuous failure modes. In a recent study for the Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) challenge, the decohesion modeling is improved by making the failure mode adjustable and by replacing the critical normal and tangential decohesion strengths with the tensile and shear peak strengths, in order to predict the cracking path in a complex configuration with the least computational cost,. It is found that there is a transition between different failure modes along the cracking path, which depends on the stress distribution around the path due to the nonlocal nature of failure evolution. Representative examples will be used to demonstrate the recent advances in simulating failure evolution with the MPM.