Consistent Phase Field Modeling of Anisotropic Fracture
With Applications to Composites
G.R. Menon (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
S.R. Turteltaub – Mentor (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
Bianca Giovanardi, PhD – Mentor (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
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Abstract
As the microstructures of engineering materials become increasingly complex, they give rise to advanced fracture processes. Despite independent efforts, consistently accounting for fracture anisotropy and mode-mixity in phase field modeling remains challenging. Motivated by the anisotropic, mixed-mode fracture processes observed in composites, the proposed methodology introduces a direction- and mode-dependent fracture energy to model crack resistance in a physically consistent manner. Contrary to methods commonly seen in the literature that incorporate anisotropic crack resistance through the crack surface density, in this work, the fracture energy is defined by a function that takes the crack orientation and mode-mixity as arguments. The model was applied to several numerical examples, ranging from isotropic mode-independent conditions to anisotropic mixed-mode conditions. In all cases, the results show good agreement with reference solutions and available experimental trends.