The recently developed hybrid discontinuous Galerkin/extrinsic cohesive law framework is extended to the study of intra-laminar fracture of composite materials. Toward this end, micro-volumes of different sizes are studied. The method captures the debonding process, which is herein proposed to be assimilated to a damaging process, before the strain softening onset, and the density of dissipated energy resulting from the damage (debonding) remains the same for the different studied cell sizes. Finally, during the strain softening phase a micro-crack initiates and propagates in agreement with experimental observations. We thus extract a resulting mesoscale cohesive law, which is independent on the cell sizes, using literature methods.

One current challenge related to computational fracture mechanics is the modeling of ductile fracture and in particular the damage to crack transition. On the one hand, continuum damage models, especially in their non-local formulation which avoids the loss of solution uniqueness, can capture the material degradation process up to the localization of the damage, but are unable to represent a discontinuity in the structure. On the other hand cohesive zone methods can represent the process zone at the crack tip governing the crack propagation, but cannot account for the diffuse material damaging process.In this paper we propose to combine, in a small deformations setting, a non-local elastic damage model with a cohesive zone model. This combination is formulated within a discontinuous Galerkin finite element discretization. Indeed this DG weak formulation can easily be developed in a non-local implicit form and naturally embeds interface elements that can be used to integrate the traction separation law of the cohesive zone model. The method remains thus consistent and computationally efficient as compared to other cohesive element approaches.The effects of the damage to crack transition and of the mesh discretization are respectively studied on the compact tension specimen and on the double-notched specimen, demonstrating the efficiency and accuracy of the method.

SUMMARYDue to its ability to take into account discontinuities, the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method presents some advantages for modeling crack initiations and propagations. This concept has been recently applied to 3D simulations and to elastic thin bodies. In this last case, the assumption of small elastic deformations before crack initiations or propagations reduces drastically the applicability of the framework to a reduced number of materials. To remove this limitation, a full-DG formulation of non-linear Kirchhoff-Love shells is presented and is used in combination with an elasto-plastic finite deformations model. The results obtained by this new formulation are in agreement with other continuum elasto-plastic shell formulations. Then this full-DG formulation of Kirchhoff-Love shells is coupled with the cohesive zone model to perform thin body fracture simulations. As this method allows considering elasto-plastic constitutive laws in combination with the cohesive model, accurate results compared to the experiments are found. In particular, the crack path and propagation rate of a blasted cylinder are shown to match experimental results. One of the main advantages of this framework is its ability to run in parallel with a high speed-up factor, allowing the simulation of ultra fine meshes.

In order to model fracture, the cohesive zone method can be coupled in a very efficient way with the Finite Element method. Nevertheless, there are some drawbacks with the classical insertion of cohesive elements. It is well known that, on one the hand, if these elements are present before fracture there is a modification of the structure stiffness, and that, on the other hand, their insertion during the simulation requires very complex implementation, especially with parallel codes. These drawbacks can be avoided by combining the cohesive method with the use of a discontinuous Galerkin formulation. In such a formulation, all the elements are discontinuous and the continuity is weakly ensured in a stable and consistent way by inserting extra terms on the boundary of elements. The recourse to interface elements allows to substitute them by cohesive elements at the onset of fracture.The purpose of this paper is to develop this formulation for Kirchhoff-Love plates and shells. It is achieved by the establishment of a full DG formulation of shell combined with a cohesive model, which is adapted to the special thickness discretization of shell formulation. In fact, this cohesive model is applied on resulting reduced stresses which are the basis of thin structures formulations.Finally, numerical examples demonstrate the efficiency of the method.