LAUSR

Abstract A reliable prediction of structural failure is extremely important in industrial applications. The promising phase-field model has been intensively studied in fracture simulation and been validated by experiments to effectively predict crack initiation, propagation as well as branching. Experimentally motivated, a variety of phase-field models have been proposed for ductile fracture, which redefine either the fracture driving force H consisting of both the elastic energy and the pseudo plastic energy or modify the degradation function g ( d ) of the fracture driving force H . Different from the existing approaches, this work formulates a novel ductile phase-field model by defining the fracture toughness G c depending on the accumulated plastic strain, i.e. the local fracture toughness decreases due to increased plastic deformation. The phase-field driving force H is still defined only consisting of the elastic strain potential based on the definition of Griffith -type fracture. As a result, the locally increasing H and the locally decreasing G c govern the ductile fracture evolution simultaneously. This approach is formulated for small strain by coupling the classical Von Mises plasticity and, subsequently, is implemented into the context of the Finite Element (FE) framework. Several representative examples are evaluated to demonstrate the capabilities of the model, and corresponding findings and perspectives are consequently summarized.