Orthogonal decomposition of anisotropic constitutive models for the phase field approach to fracture

Abstract

We propose a decomposition of constitutive relations into crack-driving and persistent portions, specifically designed for materials with anisotropic/orthotropic behavior in the phase field approach to fracture to account for the tension–compression asymmetry. This decomposition follows a variational framework, satisfying the orthogonality condition for anisotropic materials. This implies that the present model can be applied to arbitrary anisotropic elastic behavior in a three-dimensional setting. On this basis, we generalize two existing models for tension–compression asymmetry in isotropic materials, namely the ‘volumetric–deviatoric’ model (Amor et al., 2009) and the ‘no-tension’ model (Freddi and Royer-Carfagni, 2010), towards materials with anisotropic nature. Two benchmark problems, single notched tensile and shear tests, are used to study the performance of the present model. The results can retain the anisotropic constitutive behavior and the tension–compression asymmetry in the crack response, and are qualitatively in accordance with the expected behavior for orthotropic materials. Furthermore, to study the direction of maximum energy dissipation, we modify the surface integral based energy release computation, Gθ, to account only for the crack-driving energy. The computed energies with our proposed modifications predict the fracture propagation direction correctly compared with the standard Gθ method.