Gauthier Becker

Validation tests of the full-discontinuous Galerkin/extrinsic cohesive law framework of Kirchhoff-Love shells

Due to its ability to account for discontinuities, the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method presents two main advantages for modeling crack initiations and propagation. On the one hand, it provides an easy way to insert the cohesive elements during the simulation and therefore avoids the drawbacks inherent to the use of an extrinsic cohesive law. On the other hand, the capture of complex crack path requires very thin meshes, and the recourse to a parallel implementation of DG formulations exhibits a high scalability of the resolution scheme. Recently, the authors developed such a DG-fracture framework for Kirchhoff-Love shells in the linear and non-linear ranges. They proved that this framework dissipates, during the fracture process, an amount of energy equal to the fracture energy of the material and that the model is able to propagate the crack with the right speed. In this paper, novel numerical benchmarks are presented to validate the method in various fracture conditions. The two first ones include an initial notch and study the fracture propagation under two different dynamic loadings (impact and blast). The two other ones focus on the fragmentation of initially unbroken specimens due to uniform expansion, in order to demonstrate the ability of the new framework to model crack initiations. Results are in all cases in agreement with the ones reported in the literature.