Phase Field Modeling of Fracture and Stress Induced Phase Transitions

TL;DR

This paper develops a phase field model to simulate fracture and stress-induced phase transitions in solids, bridging sharp interface theories and numerical simulations for large-scale fracture analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a phase field approach that reproduces sharp interface equations and boundary conditions for fracture and phase transitions, enabling large-scale numerical simulations.

Findings

Successful large-scale fracture simulations eliminating finite-size effects

Model reproduces sharp interface equations in the limit

Generalization to multiphase systems presented

Abstract

We present a continuum theory to describe elastically induced phase transitions between coherent solid phases. In the limit of vanishing elastic constants in one of the phases, the model can be used to describe fracture on the basis of the late stage of the Asaro-Tiller-Grinfeld instability. Starting from a sharp interface formulation we derive the elastic equations and the dissipative interface kinetics. We develop a phase field model to simulate these processes numerically; in the sharp interface limit, it reproduces the desired equations of motion and boundary conditions. We perform large scale simulations of fracture processes to eliminate finite-size effects and compare the results to a recently developed sharp interface method. Details of the numerical simulations are explained, and the generalization to multiphase simulations is presented.