Non-local damage mechanics with application to concrete

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explains the basic concepts of continuum damage mechanics and its nonlocal formulation. Using one- and two-dimensional examples, it is shown that a stress-strain law with softening postulated within the standard continuum theory leads to physically meaningless results and that the numerical solution suffers by a pathological sensitivity to the finite element discretization. A suitable regularization technique can be based on the non-local formulation, with damage driven by the weighted spatial average of the equivalent strain. Efficiency of the non-local simulation can be increased by mesh-adaptive techniques that adjust the finite element mesh according to the evolving strain localization pattern.