A 3D benchmark problem for crack propagation in brittle fracture

Crack Growth during Brittle Fracture

Title: Crack Growth During Brittle Fracture in Compression. Author: Bartlett W. Paulding, Jr. Submitted to the Department of Geology and Geophysics February 9, 1965 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Photoelastic analysis of several two-crack arrays predicts that compressive fracture is initiated at cra...

Supersonic crack propagation in a class of lattice models of mode III brittle fracture.

We study a lattice model for mode III crack propagation in brittle materials in a stripe geometry at constant applied stretching. Stiffening of the material at large deformation produces supersonic crack propagation. For large stretching the propagation is guided by well-developed soliton waves. For low stretching, the crack-tip velocity has a universal dependence on stretching that can be obta...

An Einstein Model of Brittle Crack Propagation

We propose a minimal nonlinear model of brittle crack propagation by considering only the motion of the crack-tip atom. The model captures many essential features of steady-state crack velocity and is in excellent quantitative agreement with many-body dynamical simulations. The model exhibits lattice-trapping. For loads just above this, the crack velocity rises sharply, reaching a limiting valu...

Energy minimizing brittle crack propagation II

Anisotropic mesh adaptation for quasistatic crack propagation in brittle materials

The numerical simulation of quasistatic fracturing of brittle material, where no predefined crack path is imposed, is a challenging problem. In particular, we deal with the Francfort-Marigo model which requires the minimization of the well-known nonconvex and nonsmooth Mumford-Shah functional. To deal with a smoother problem which eases the minimization process of the energy, we consider the Γ-...