23 August, 2023
Monday, Sept 11th, 2023
11:45 KSA time (UTC +3)
Current Trends and Open Problems in Computational Fracture Mechanics
By Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. F. Aldakheel
Professor for high-performance computing - Leibniz Universität Hannover
Abstract
Fracture processes occur in different environments and define the lifespan of many engineering structures. To illustrate the effects of fracture in more detail, one can think of its negative implications, like failure of large structures, e.g., bridges, ships, and vessels. Further instances are shattered glass, a broken leg, a ruptured aorta, a torn sail, a broken car part, a cracked beam, among many others. Fracture processes can also be on purpose and useful, as in chip forming during cutting, tearing open of packages along precut lines, and breaking off of chocolate pieces. From a computational mechanics side, this talk will focus on the continuum phase-field approach to fracture, which is based on the regularization of sharp crack discontinuities. Due to its simplicity, this methodology has gained wide interest by the engineering community since 2008. From there on, many scientists have worked in this field and developed phase-field approaches for finite elements, isogeometric analysis, and, lately, also for the virtual element technology. This presentation will present a set of recently developed numerical tools to address these challenges. The main driving force for these developments is the possibility to handle complex fracture phenomena within numerical methods in two and three dimensions.