Large scale simulation of pressure induced phase-field fracture propagation using Utopia

TL;DR

This paper introduces Utopia, an open-source C++ library enabling efficient parallel multilevel solutions for large-scale non-linear phase-field fracture simulations, demonstrating its effectiveness on complex fracture networks with up to 1000 fractures.

Contribution

The paper presents Utopia, a high-level framework for parallel multilevel solution strategies, and applies it to large-scale phase-field fracture propagation problems.

Findings

Utopia enables efficient parallel solution of large non-linear fracture problems.

The RMTR method shows good scalability on complex fracture networks.

Large networks of up to 1000 fractures are successfully simulated.

Abstract

Non-linear phase field models are increasingly used for the simulation of fracture propagation models. The numerical simulation of fracture networks of realistic size requires the efficient parallel solution of large coupled non-linear systems. Although in principle efficient iterative multi-level methods for these types of problems are available, they are not widely used in practice due to the complexity of their parallel implementation. Here, we present Utopia, which is an open-source C++ library for parallel non-linear multilevel solution strategies. Utopia provides the advantages of high-level programming interfaces while at the same time a framework to access low-level data-structures without breaking code encapsulation. Complex numerical procedures can be expressed with few lines of code, and evaluated by different implementations, libraries, or computing hardware. In this paper, we investigate the parallel performance of our implementation of the recursive multilevel trust-region (RMTR) method based on the Utopia library. RMTR is a globally convergent multilevel solution strategy designed to solve non-convex constrained minimization problems. In particular, we solve pressure-induced phase-field fracture propagation in large and complex fracture networks. Solving such problems is deemed challenging even for a few fractures, however, here we are considering networks of realistic size with up to 1000 fractures.