Resumen de Continuous-discontinuous modelling for quasi-brittle failure: propagating cracks in a regularised bulk
E. Tamayo Mas
A new strategy to describe failure of quasi-brittle materials -concrete, for example- is presented. Traditionally, numerical simulation of quasi-brittle failure has been tackled from two different points of view: damage mechanics and fracture mechanics. The former, which belongs to the family of continuous models, describes fracture as a process of strain localisation and damage growth. The latter, which falls in the family of discontinuous models, explicitly introduces displacement discontinuities. Recently, some new approaches that merge these two classical theories have been devised. Although these combined approaches allow a better characterisation of the whole failure process, there are still some issues that need to be addressed, specially regarding the model switching -from the continuous to the continuous-discontinuous strategy. The goal of this thesis is to present a new contribution in this direction. Our main concern is to properly account for the three main difficulties that emerge when dealing with combined strategies: (1) the pathological mesh-dependence exhibited by local softening models needs to be corrected; (2) the crack-path location has to be determined and (3) the switching from the continuous to the continuous-discontinuous strategy should be done in such a way that the two approaches are energetically equivalent. First, we extend the applicability to a two- and three-dimensional setting of an alternative approach to regularise strain-softening -where non-locality is introduced at the level of displacements rather than some internal variable. To this end, we propose new combined boundary conditions for the regularisation equation (for the smoothed displacement field). As illustrated with different two- and three-dimensional examples, these boundary conditions allow to obtain physical realistic results for the first stages of the failure process. Second, we present a new combined formulation that allows the propagation of cracks through a regularised bulk. To define the crack-path, instead of the classical mechanical criteria, we propose to use a geometrical criterion. More specifically, given a regularised damage field D(x), the discontinuity propagates following the direction dictated by the medial axis of the isoline (or isosurface in 3D) D(x) = D*. That is, a geometric tool widely used for image analysis, computer vision applications or mesh generation purposes is used here to locate cracks. We illustrate the capabilities of this new approach by carrying out different two- and three-dimensional numerical tests. Last, we propose a new criterion to estimate the energy not yet dissipated by the bulk when switching models, so it can be transferred to the cohesive crack. This ensures that the continuous and the continuous-discontinuous strategies are energetically equivalent. Compared to other existing techniques, we present a strategy that accounts for the different unloading branches of damage models thus better estimating the energy that has to be transferred. We illustrate the performance of this technique with one- and two-dimensional examples.
