A continuous–discontinuous approach to simulate fracture processes in quasi-brittle materials

Scaling of Fracture Strength in Disordered Quasi-Brittle Materials

This paper presents two main results. The first result indicates that in materials with broadly distributed microscopic heterogeneities, the fracture strength distribution corresponding to the peak load of the material response does not follow the commonly used Weibull and (modified) Gumbel distributions. Instead, a lognormal distribution describes more adequately the fracture strengths corresp...

A non-equilibrium approach to processing Hopkinson Bar bending test data: Application to quasi-brittle materials

The aim of this paper was to describe a method of analysing the test data recorded during a Hopkinson Bar bending test. This three-point dynamic bending test was designed for testing the strength of materials under dynamic loads. It is carried out on a specimen consisting of a beam placed on two supports, which is subjected to an impact. The use of Hopkinson Bar as supports makes it possible to...

From brittle to ductile fracture in disordered materials.

We introduce a lattice model able to describe damage and yielding in heterogeneous materials ranging from brittle to ductile ones. Ductile fracture surfaces, obtained when the system breaks once the strain is completely localized, are shown to correspond to minimum energy surfaces. The similarity of the resulting fracture paths to the limits of brittle fracture or minimum energy surfaces is qua...

On an Eigendeformation Approach to Brittle Fracture

The paper presents a numerical implementation of a novel approximation scheme for Griffith’s theory of brittle fracture recently proposed in [1]. The total potential energy of a brittle body (including bulk and surface terms) is variationally approximated by a family of functionals, depending on a small penalty parameter ε. The (two-field) approximating functionals have as arguments the displac...

Multiscale failure modelling of quasi - brittle materials