Elena Benvenuti

A thermodynamically consistent nonlocal formulation for damaging materials

A thermodynamically consistent nonlocal formulation for damaging materials is presented. The second principle of thermodynamics is enforced in a nonlocal form over the volume where the dissipative mechanism takes place. The nonlocal forces thermodynamically conjugated are obtained consistently from the free energy. The paper indeed extends to elastic damaging materials a formulation originally proposed by Polizzotto et al. for nonlocal plasticity. Constitutive and computational aspects of the model are discussed. The damage consistency conditions turn out to be formulated as an integral complementarity problem and, consequently, after discretization, as a linear complementarity problem. A new numerical algorithm of solution is proposed and meaningful one-dimensional and two-dimensional examples are presented.

Finite Element Quadrature of Regularized Discontinuous and Singular Level Set Functions in 3D Problems

Regularized Heaviside and Dirac delta function are used in several fields of computational physics and mechanics. Hence the issue of the quadrature of integrals of discontinuous and singular functions arises. In order to avoid ad-hoc quadrature procedures, regularization of the discontinuous and the singular fields is often carried out. In particular, weight functions of the signed distance with respect to the discontinuity interface are exploited. Tornberg and Engquist (Journal of Scientific Computing, 2003, 19: 527–552) proved that the use of compact support weight function is not suitable because it leads to errors that do not vanish for decreasing mesh size. They proposed the adoption of non-compact support weight functions. In the present contribution, the relationship between the Fourier transform of the weight functions and the accuracy of the regularization procedure is exploited. The proposed regularized approach was implemented in the eXtended Finite Element Method. As a three-dimensional example, we study a slender solid characterized by an inclined interface across which the displacement is discontinuous. The accuracy is evaluated for varying position of the discontinuity interfaces with respect to the underlying mesh. A procedure for the choice of the regularization parameters is proposed.

Advances in Discretization Methods : Discontinuities, Virtual Elements, Fictitious Domain Methods

This book gathers selected contributions on emerging research work presented at the International Conference eXtended Discretization MethodS (X-DMS), held in Ferrara in September 2015. It highlights the most relevant advances made at the international level in the context of expanding classical discretization methods, like finite elements, to the numerical analysis of a variety of physical problems. The improvements are intended to achieve higher computational efficiency and to account for special features of the solution directly in the approximation space and/or in the discretization procedure. The methods described include, among others, partition of unity methods (meshfree, XFEM, GFEM), virtual element methods, fictitious domain methods, and special techniques for static and evolving interfaces. The uniting feature of all contributions is the direct link between computational methodologies and their application to different engineering areas.