Abstract
This chapter examines the fundamental concept of the fictitious crack model (FCM) and related issues in its numerical implementation. The FCM proposed by Hillerborg, Modeer, and Petersson (1976) for studying crack formation and crack growth in concrete brought two new concepts to the study of concrete fracture: the physical presence of an FPZ (“microcracked zone” in their original words) in front of an open crack due to strain localization and a constitutive law for crack propagation stipulating the relations between the cohesive forces and the crack-opening displacement (COD) inside the FPZ—in other words, the tension-softening relation. These are the fundamental concepts of the FCM that have become the basis of fracture mechanics of concrete. Furthermore, the chapter addresses the issue of stress singularity underlying the FCM formulation. Some effective modeling techniques are introduced, including the dual-nodes method for crack-path modeling, the path-shifting method for remeshing of curvilinear crack trajectories, and incremental stress analysis.
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