Damage and fracture evolution in brittle materials by shape optimization methods

This paper is devoted to a numerical implementation of the Francfort–Marigo model of damage evolution in brittle materials. This quasi-static model is based, at each time step, on the minimization of a total energy which is the sum of an elastic energy and a Griffith-type dissipated energy. Such a minimization is carried over all geometric mixtures of the two, healthy and damaged, elastic phases, respecting an irreversibility constraint. Numerically, we consider a situation where two well-separated phases coexist, and model their interface by a level set function that is transported according to the shape derivative of the minimized total energy. In the context of interface variations (Hadamard method) and using a steepest descent algorithm, we compute local minimizers of this quasi-static damage model. Initially, the damaged zone is nucleated by using the so-called topological derivative. We show that, when the damaged phase is very weak, our numerical method is able to predict crack propagation, including kinking and branching. Several numerical examples in 2d and 3d are discussed.