The concept of diffuse crack introduces a way to smeer the famare due to brittle failure. As it is shown in Figure 1 a sharp crack, which separated the rod in two can be considered as a continuous distribution of a damage (phase) field. This variable reduces both the real stress and stiffness of the material. This way it proposes a thermodynamically consistent scheme to model crack initiation, propagation, benching and collision.

Our implementation concentrates is done in the commercial code ABAQUS/Standard. A new used defined element was written to incorporate the newly defined degree of freedom (damage).

Whit its help several complicated cases were solved both in 2D and 3D.

Further information about the method can be found in our paper with several examples.

The figures below show a few results obtained with the phase-field implementation. The red color shows the fully damaged material which has no stiffness or stress resistance.

Try out the new element with these tutorials.