Studies in elastic fracture mechanics based on the material force method

The object of this work is to discuss a further improvement of the material force method for nonlinear hyperelastostatic fracture mechanics. We investigate the accuracy of the material force method within a ‘modi ed boundary layer’-formulation using a Ramberg–Osgood material type for the sake of comparison. The proposed improvement leads to a reliable and very accurate method to compute the vectorial J -integral in fracture mechanics