Phase field modeling and computer implementation: A review

TL;DR

This review discusses phase field models for fracture, highlighting their advantages in simulating complex crack behaviors without explicit crack criteria, and compares different approaches through numerical benchmarks.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of phase field fracture models and compares their numerical implementations and capabilities.

Findings

PFMs can simulate complex fracture processes naturally.

They eliminate the need for explicit crack criteria.

Numerical benchmarks demonstrate their effectiveness.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the theories and computer implementation aspects of phase field models (PFM) of fracture. The advantage of PFM over discontinuous approaches to fracture is that PFM can elegantly simulate complicated fracture processes including fracture initiation, propagation, coalescence, and branching by using only a scalar field, the phase field. In addition, fracture is a natural outcome of the simulation and obtained through the solution of an additional differential equation related to the phase field. No extra fracture criteria are needed and an explicit representation of a crack surface as well as complex track crack procedures are avoided in PFM for fracture, which in turn dramatically facilitates the implementation. The PFM is thermodynamically consistent and can be easily extended to multi-physics problem by 'changing' the energy functional accordingly. Besides an overview of different PFMs, we also present comparative numerical benchmark examples to show the capability of PFMs.