Engineering Fracture Mechanics

To model fracture in hyperelastic material and hydrogel, we have implemented a robust two- and three-dimensional phase field method in the commercial finite element code ABAQUS/Standard. The method is based on the rate-independent variational principle of diffuse fracture and also exploits the analogy between the phase field evolution law and the heat transfer equation, enabling the use of Abaqus’ in-built features and sparing the need for defining user elements.