Non-local models for ductile failure

Abstract

Ductile damage can be dealt with continuous descriptions of material, resorting, for example, to continuous damage mechanic descriptions or micromechanical constitutive models. When it comes to describe material behaviour near and beyond fracture these approaches are no longer sufficient or valid and continuous/discontinuous approaches can be adopted to track fracture initiation and propagation. Apart from more pragmatic solutions like element erosion or remeshing techniques more advanced approaches based on the X-FEM concept, in particular associated with non-local formulations, may be adopted to numerically model these problems. Nevertheless, very often, for practical reasons, some important aspects are somewhat left behind, specially energetic requirements to promote the necessary transition of energy release associated with material damage and fracture energy associated to a crack creation and evolution. Phase-field methods may combine advantages of regularised continuous models by providing a similar description to non-local thermodynamical continuous damage mechanics, as well as, a "continuous" approach to numerically follow crack evolution and branching