Damage growth modeling using the Thick Level Set approach

Nicolas Chevaugeon (1) , Nicolas Moës (1) , Paul-Emile Bernard (1)

1 GeM - Institut de Recherche en Génie Civil et Mécanique

The aim of our work is to build a model to predict the full scenario of degradation of solids under mechanical loading. Such a model involves the interaction of complex processes and obviously requires at least two main ingredients: fracture and damage mechanics. On one side, although the basis of fracture mechanics can be considered as well-known, processes as cracks initiation, merging or branching are still difficult to both model physically and represent numerically. Classical numerical representations of cracks, based on the eXtended finite element method using level set functions quickly becomes a tedious task as the number of cracks grows and crack merging is hard to handle. It is now commonly admitted that fracture mechanics alone is insufficient to model the entire degradation process. Prediction of phenomena as crack initiation requires damage mechanics. However, the link between damage and crack is not obvious from both the physical and numerical point of view.

Mots clés: fracture mechanics; thick level Set; damage modeling

Domaines: Mécanique des matériaux [physics.class-ph]

Nicolas Chevaugeon, Nicolas Moës, Paul-Emile Bernard. Damage growth modeling using the Thick Level Set approach. European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering (ECCOMAS 2012), Sep 2012, Vienne, Austria. ⟨hal-01008056⟩