Development of a fully automatic damage simulation framework for quasi-brittle materials

Abstract

This paper proposes a fully automatic analysis framework for static damage analysis of quasi-brittle materials exploiting adaptive mesh refinement approaches as well as adaptive load stepping techniques. The damage process is modelled using an integral-type nonlocal damage model which alleviates the mesh dependence issue. The scaled boundary finite element method and quadtree meshing algorithm are employed in the adaptive analysis. The quadtree algorithm is simple for adaptively remeshing and the mesh refinement is limited to local regions around the damage zones. The elements of the quadtree mesh are modelled by the scaled boundary finite element method, naturally resolving the hanging nodes encountered by the standard finite elements. Furthermore, the regular element shapes and small number of unique element patterns permit a significant reduction of computational cost on processing the element formulations, and an easy implementation of data transfer between two successive meshes. In the last step, the adaptive meshing strategy is combined with an automatic load stepping scheme to create a fully automatic analysis framework. By means of various numerical examples the performance of the proposed method predicting the damage evolution in structures is analysed in terms of its accuracy and efficiency.