Irreversible phase field models for crack growth in industrial applications: thermal stress, viscoelasticity, hydrogen embrittlement

Abstract

Three new industrial applications of irreversible phase field models for crack growth are presented in this study. The phase field model for irreversible crack growth in an elastic material is derived as a unidirectional gradient flow of the Francfort–Marigo energy with the Ambrosio–Tortorelli regularization, which is known to be consistent with classic Griffith fracture theory. The obtained compact parabolic-elliptic system of PDEs including two regularization parameters for space and time enables us to simulate various kinds of crack behaviors with standard finite element software, without any geometric restriction on the crack path. We extend the irreversible phase field model to thermal cracking in solder and to cracking in a viscoelastic material, keeping the compact forms of the PDEs and the energy consistency. On the other hand, for hydrogen-assisted cracking in metal, we propose a compact phase field model focusing on a kinematic jamming effect of the hydrogen by a weak coupling approach. Several numerical experiments for these three models show not only their reasonableness and usefulness but also flexible extendability of the phase field approach in fracture mechanics.