Computational Fracture Mechanics and Fatigue

The phase-field modeling approach to fracture has recently attracted a lot of attention due to its remarkable capability to naturally handle the numerical computation of fracture phenomena with arbitrarily complex crack topologies in three dimensions (see our external page review paper). On one side, the approach can be obtained through the regularization of the variational approach to fracture introduced by Francfort and Marigo in 1998, which is conceptually related to Griffith's view of fracture; on the other side, it can be constructed as a gradient damage model with some specific properties. In the past years, in our research we have focused on this approach and developed it further in a number of areas.