A variational discrete element method is applied to simulate quasi-static crack propagation. Cracks are considered propagate between the mesh cells through facets. The elastic behaviour parametrized by continuous mechanical parameters (Young modulus and Poisson ratio). energetic cracking criterion coupled a kinking guide process. Two-dimensional numerical examples presented illustrate robustnes...

We propose a discrete time model for dynamic fracture based on crack regularization. The advantages of our approach are threefold: first, our regularization of the crack set has been rigorously shown to converge to the correct sharp-interface energy Ambrosio and Tortorelli (Comm. Pure Appl. Math., 43(8): 999–1036 (1990); Boll. Un. Mat. Ital. B (7), 6(1):105– 123, 1992); second, our condition fo...

Occurrence of top down and bottom up fatigue cracking in asphaltic pavements is common. Conventional pavement analysis methods ignore the existence of cracks in asphaltic layers. However, it seems that the responses of cracked pavement would not be the same as a pavement without crack. This paper describes effects of crack type, position and length, and vehicles tire inflation pressure and axle...

Some Characteristic behavior of the T e (Atluri, Nishioka and Nakagaki (1984)) is identi®ed in this paper through an extensive numerical study. T e is a near tip contour integral and has been known to measure the magnitude of singular deformation ®eld at crack tip for arbitrary material models. In this paper, T e is found to behave quite differently for different choices of near tip integral co...

Characterizing the fast evolution of microstructural defects is key to understanding "crackling" phenomena during the deformation of solid materials. For example, it has been proposed using atomistic simulations of crack propagation in elastic materials that the formation of a nonlinear hyperelastic or plastic zone around moving crack tips controls crack velocity. To date, progress in understan...

We describe experiments on the dynamic fracture of the brittle plastic, PMMA. The results suggest a view of the fracture process that is based on the existence and subsequent evolution of an instability, which causes a single crack to become unstable to frustrated microscopic branching events. We demonstrate that a number of long-standing questions in the dynamic fracture of amorphous, brittle ...

A continuum model based upon the Peierls-Nabarro description of a dislocation ahead of a crack is used to evaluate the critical mode I loading for dislocation nucleation at the tip of a finite, pre-blunted crack. A similar approach is used to evaluate the critical mode I loading for atomic decohesion. Results are presented for various crack tip root radii (a measure of bluntness), for several c...

The mathematical analysis developed for energy minimizing fracture evolutions has been difficult to extend to locally minimizing evolutions. The reasons for this difficulty are not obvious, and our goal in this paper is to describe in some detail what precisely the issues are and why the previous analysis in fact cannot be extended to the most natural models based on local minimality. We also i...