A minimum Lemaitre's damage strain energy release rate-based model for competitive fracture process simulation of quasi-brittle materials

Abstract A physical damage model based on minimum Lemaitre's damage strain energy release rate is developed to describe quasi-brittle materials' softening. A modified finite element procedure together with the developed damage model is used to simulate the fracture process of quasi-brittle specimens. In the developed procedure, damage is only updated in the most dangerous element at each iteration, and mesh dependency can be reduced based on this way. Two representative numerical examples support the effectiveness of the developed damage model and procedure, which illustrate their ability to objectively simulate the mixed-mode failure process of quasi-brittle materials due to tension, compression and shear. In addition, we found that the simulation results obtained from the modified finite element procedure are insensitive to grid mesh.