Fatigue Phase‐field Modeling for Elastomeric Materials

Abstract

AbstractFatigue failure prediction of elastomeric materials plays a crucial role in engineering applications, e.g., rolling tires. Experimental investigations, as a straightforward evaluation of fatigue failure, do not enable an efficient insight due to significant time consumption. Therefore, several numerical approaches are developed to model fatigue fracture or damage behavior of material components subjected to cyclic loading. Inspired by [1], the work at hand incorporates a degrading fracture toughness into a promising phase‐field method. As a smeared crack representation, the phase‐field model does not depend upon any explicit criterion for crack evolution, e.g., crack initiation and propagation. Furthermore, this work proposes a novel algorithm, which is based on a post‐processing technique, to evaluate the energy release rate for PARIS' parameters during the stable crack propagation regime. The methodology is implemented into the Finite Element framework and a demonstrative numerical example is simulated.