Open Access

ARTICLE

From Damage to Crack: A B.E. Approach

V. Mallardo, C. Alessandri¹

1 mlv@unife.it, ale@unife.it, Dep. Architecture, Via Quartieri 8, 44100 Ferrara, Italy

Structural Durability & Health Monitoring 2006, 2(3), 165-176. https://doi.org/10.3970/sdhm.2006.002.165

Abstract

The formation of cracks and their propagation in brittle materials has been intensively studied in the last years. The main difficulty is related to the theoretical and numerical possibility to follow the development of regions of highly localised strains. The nonlinear phenomenon is physically different from the one which occurs in ductile materials: it starts with a narrow fracture process zone containing a large number of distributed microcracks which could lead to the formation of macrocracks and eventually to rupture. In the present paper, a simple nonlocal damage model is coupled to the crack analysis in order to describe the formation and propagation of a crack in quasibrittle materials. The numerical scheme is based on the dual boundary element method which allows for the discretisation of the boundary, of the crack and of the part of the domain in which the damage is supposed to occur.

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Keywords

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