One way to include fracture and fragmentation when analyzing loaded mechanical systems is based on the DEM, [2], [3]. In recent years this approach was adopted in geomechanics and civil engineering to model fracture in elastic-brittle materials, e.g. [1] and [5]. Using this approach, the material is considered as being fully discontinuous and made up by assembling and bonding adjacent discrete ...

Findings from experiments and particle simulations for dry and cohesive granular materials are presented with the goal to reach quantitative agreement between simulations and experiments. Results for the compressibility, tested with the FT4 Powder Rheometer are presented. The first simulation results involve the strain controlled uniaxial compression of frictionless polydisperse spheres in a bi...

The paper presents a computational approach and numerical data which facilitate the use of the smeared-tip method for cohesive fracture in large enough structures. In the recently developed K-version of the smeared tip method, the large-size asymptotic profile of the stress intensity factor density along a cohesive crack is considered as a material characteristic, which is uniquely related to t...

INTRODUCTION A fracture mechanics based approach has been recently proposed to measure the changes in fracture toughness of small animal bones due to aging, disease, and treatments for osteoporosis [1-3]. In contrast to standard strength tests, such tests require a smaller sample size [2] and provide a measure of material level changes [2,3]. Here we present a complementary computational approa...

Damage-induced strain softening is of vital importance for the modeling of localized failure in frictional-cohesive materials. This paper addresses strain localization of damaging solids and the resulting consistent frictional-cohesive crack models. As a supplement to the framework recently established for stress-based continuum material models in rate form (Wu and Cervera 2015, 2016), several ...

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