Topological search of the crack pattern from a continuum mechanical computation

Marina Bottoni (1) , Frédéric Dufour (2, 3) , Cédric Giry (4)

1 EDF - EDF
2 3SR - Laboratoire sols, solides, structures - risques [Grenoble]
3 RV - Risques, Vulnérabilité des structures et comportement mécanique des matériaux
4 LMT - Laboratoire de Mécanique et Technologie

In this contribution, a method to track the crack path from a continuum finite element simulation using failure material models is presented. The work belongs to a larger project, aiming at extracting the crack opening a posteriori of a continuum finite element computation to deal with durability assessment of concrete structures. Cracking is modelled in a diffuse manner by a distribution of an appropriate scalar state variable associated to material degradation. With the proposed method, the crack path is found in the post-processing phase by means of a step-by-step procedure. At each step, a new location point is computed where the state variable is maximum in a given direction at a given distance. Furthermore a specific procedure is proposed to detect multiple cracks in an automatic way. The proposed method is successfully applied to two studies implying either a single crack or a multi-crack pattern, obtained with different continuum models to highlight the versatility of the proposed approach.

Mots clés: Damage; Crack path; Concrete; Failure; Topology search

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

Marina Bottoni, Frédéric Dufour, Cédric Giry. Topological search of the crack pattern from a continuum mechanical computation. Engineering Structures, 2015, 99, pp.346-359. ⟨10.1016/j.engstruct.2015.05.005⟩. ⟨hal-01545335⟩