On the gradient enhancement of microplane damage models

Abstract

AbstractThe microplane model allows for the description of damage induced anisotropy in a natural manner by introducing constitutive laws for quantities on individual microplanes at each material point. However, if damage or other strain softening constitutive laws are used within the microplane approach, the well‐known problem of localization arises leading to pathological mesh dependency. This contribution focuses on the implicit gradient enhancement and its efficient application to regularize microplane damage models. Previous works enhanced the strain tensor, thus resulting in large number of additional degrees of freedom. A new method which enhances the equivalent strain driving the damage on each microplane is introduced. The new method limits the number of additional degrees of freedom to one, while preserving the regularizing effect. The capabilities of the proposed formulation are demonstrated by a numerical example. (© 2014 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)