Open Access

ARTICLE

Fracture Modeling of Viscoelastic Behavior of Solid Propellants Based on Accelerated Phase-Field Model

Yuan Mei^1,2, Daokui Li^1,2, Shiming Zhou^1,2,*, Zhibin Shen^1,2

1 College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China
2 Hunan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Planning and Simulation for Aerospace Missions, Changsha, 410073, China

* Corresponding Author: Shiming Zhou. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Advances in Computational Fracture Mechanics: Theories, Techniques, and Applications)

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2025, 145(1), 153-187. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2025.070252

Received 11 July 2025; Accepted 17 September 2025; Issue published 30 October 2025

Abstract

Viscoelastic solids, such as composite propellants, exhibit significant time and rate dependencies, and their fracture processes display high levels of nonlinearity. However, the correlation between crack propagation and viscoelastic energy dissipation in these materials remains unclear. Therefore, accurately modeling and understanding of their fracture behavior is crucial for relevant engineering applications. This study proposes a novel viscoelastic phase-field model. In the numerical implementation, the adopted adaptive time-stepping iterative strategy effectively accelerates the coupling iteration efficiency between the phase-field and the displacement field. Moreover, all unknown parameters in the model, including the form of the phase-field degradation function, are identified through fitting against experimental data. Based on an introduced scaling factor, the mechanical response behaviors of solid propellant dogbone specimens under cyclic loading, relaxation, and tension are analyzed, and the predictive capacity of the model is demonstrated by comparing the experimental data with the simulation results. Finally, modeling results for Mode-I and Mode-II crack propagation in single-edge-notched specimens indicate that the reduction of viscous energy dissipation will significantly increase the fracture growth rate, but under the same boundary conditions, the crack path remains unchanged.

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Keywords

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