Abstract
SummaryThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the development and the evolution of the fracture process zone during fracture and damage in quasi‐brittle materials. A model taking into account the material details at the mesoscale is used to describe the failure process at the scale of the heterogeneities. This model is used to compute histograms of the relative distances between damaged points. These numerical results are compared with experimental data, where the damage evolution is monitored using acoustic emissions. Histograms of the relative distances between damage events in the numerical calculations and acoustic events in the experiments exhibit good agreement. It is shown that the mesoscale model provides relevant information from the point of view of both global responses and the local failure process. © 2015 The Authors. International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Highlights
Fracture of quasi-brittle materials such as concrete or rocks is characterized by a stress-free macrocrack surrounded by a damage zone
We compare the numerical results obtained with the mesomodel, denoted as ‘Num.’, the results reported by Grégoire et al [1], denoted as ‘Exp.#1’, and the experimental results from our experimental work, denoted as ‘Exp.#2’
We observe that the experimental data points are in good agreement with the results obtained via the mesoscopic approach
Summary
Fracture of quasi-brittle materials such as concrete or rocks is characterized by a stress-free macrocrack surrounded by a damage zone. At the tip of the macro-crack and ahead lies the so-called fracture process zone (FPZ), which is a region of the material undergoing distributed damage. The size of the FPZ in these heterogeneous materials is large enough to influence the mechanical behaviour of the structure significantly. The understanding of the evolution of the FPZ size in such heterogeneous materials is still an open issue in the community. G. built the energy maps and performed the num/exp comparative histogram analysis.
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