Domain information transfer method and its application in quasi-brittle failure analysis

Abstract

This article presents a domain information transfer method for the purpose of quasi-brittle failure analysis. It contains two separated computational levels. On macroscopic level, the material domains are viewed as elementary substances which construct the whole structure. The macroscopic governing equations are established based on this point of view and the boundary displacements of material domains are defined as basic unknowns. Each damaged material domain will be assigned a mesoscale model and the information transfer mechanism from a mesoscale domain to a macroscale domain is established. The damage localization phenomenon is equivalently represented on macroscopic level by boundary deformation of material domains and the macroscale meshes are invariant during analysis. The information exchange element based on nonlocal quadrature scheme is proposed and the efficient upscaling is realized. The proposed method is an efficient and flexible way for quasi-brittle failure analysis.