F.A. Gilabert

Modelling fracture process in ceramic materials using the Material Point Method

The Material Point Method (MPM) is a mathematical procedure based on the particle-in-cell technique, which combines the advantages of the Finite Element Method and the particle dynamics simulations. As all the material properties are transported by the points, a static structured mesh is used as a background scratch-pad for computations. This feature depicts MPM as a true meshless method, where the mesh entanglements (dependency or re-meshing) are avoided. Recently, MPM has been successfully applied to study the arbitrary crack propagation in solids. In this work, we focus our interest on a particular two-dimensional case in which a single crack initiates and propagates in a hypothetic multiphase system consisting of various quartz particles embedded in a glassy phase.

Numerical study of transitional brittle-to-ductile debonding of a capsule embedded in a matrix

Abstract This work presents a numerical study that addresses the role of the interfacial fracture energy on the debonding process of a capsule embedded in an elastic matrix, which undergoes a uniaxial far-field stress. The motivation of this work is to analyze and to understand the effects of this energy in the framework of the so-called encapsulation-based self-healing cementitious materials, where glass capsules filled with a fluid healing agent are embedded in a cement-based matrix. A two-dimensional plane strain model based on a combination of the classical finite element method and cohesive surface techniques implemented in the commercial code Abaqus® has been used. It has been found that there exist three types of debonding regimes, ranging from a perfect brittle response up to a ductile-limited response, and whose range of validity is governed by a straightforward dimensionless number able to predict the type of debonding as a function of flexural properties of the capsule and the interface strength.