A micromorphic phase-field model for brittle and quasi-brittle fracture

Abstract

In this manuscript, a robust and variationally consistent technique is proposed for local treatment of the phase-field fracture irreversibility. This technique involves an extension of the phase-field fracture energy functional through a micromorphic approach. Consequently, the phase-field is transformed into a local variable, while a micromorphic variable regularizes the problem. The local nature of the phase-field variable enables an easier implementation of its irreversibility using a pointwise ‘max’ with system level precision. Unlike the popular history variable approach, which also enforces local fracture irreversibility, the micromorphic approach yields a variationally consistent framework. The efficacy of the micromorphic approach in phase-field fracture modelling is demonstrated in this work with numerical experiments on benchmark brittle and quasi-brittle fracture problems in linear elastic media. Furthermore, the extensibility of the micromorphic phase-field fracture model towards multiphysics problems is demonstrated. To that end, a theoretical extension is carried out for modelling hydraulic fracture, and relevant numerical experiments exhibiting crack merging are presented. The source code as well as the data set accompanying this work would be made available on GitHub (https://github.com/ritukeshbharali/falcon).