Cohesive fracture in 1D: quasi-static evolution and derivation from static phase-field models

In this paper we propose a notion of irreversibility for the evolution of cracks in presence of cohesive forces, which allows for different responses in the loading and unloading processes, motivated by a variational approximation with damage models. We investigate its applicability to the construction of a quasi-static evolution in a simple one-dimensional model. The cohesive fracture model arises naturally via Γ-convergence from a phase-field model of the generalized Ambrosio-Tortorelli type, which may be used as regularization for numerical simulations.