A Numerical Method to Analyze the Brittle Fracture Using Phase-field Theory

Phase-field method is one of the recent developed fracture simulation methods which has attracted much interest in the last decade. Phase-field method can precisely simulate the crack nucleation as well as crack propagation path in complicated geometries. In general, phase filed method is a nonlocal theory that defines the cracks and other defects as a continuous part of the geometry with defining a length scale parameter. The major deficiency of this method is that it computationally is very time consuming. In this paper, a new numerical method based on finite element method was proposed to diminish the computational cost. The suggested numerical method was coded in Abaqus/Standard using an UEL subroutine. The simulations of different two-dimensional geometries demonstrate the capability of this method to predict the fracture process of brittle material. Results show that the proposed numerical method could significantly decrease the solution time in comparison to other methods.