A phase field numerical manifold method for crack propagation in quasi-brittle materials

Abstract

In the present work, a phase field numerical manifold method (PFNMM) is proposed for crack growth in brittle materials. The advantages of the phase field method (PFM) in modeling crack initiation and crack branching, and those of the numerical manifold method (NMM) in discretizing the computational model are integrated together in the proposed numerical model. The proposed numerical model is very suitable for simulating multiple crack propagation problems. The implementation details of the proposed numerical model are well presented. Several benchmark examples are adopted to validate the proposed numerical approach. The results indicate that the crack propagation topologies and force-displacement curves obtained by the proposed numerical model are in good agreement with others, e.g. Miehe et al. (2010) and Molnar and Gravouil (2017) [3]. The convergence of numerical solution from the proposed numerical model is also investigated. The PFNMM deserves a further investigation.