Quasi-Static and Dynamic Crack Propagation Based on Adaptive Phase Field Method Using Novel Physics-Based Refinement Criteria

The present work extends recently proposed physics-based refinement criteria to dynamic crack propagation problems and discusses the implementation of the same in an open-source finite element package, FEniCS in both two and three dimensions. The efficacy and the robustness (in terms of the degrees of freedom) of the implementation is demonstrated against uniform refinement and other adaptive methods proposed in the literature. In addition to the standard benchmark problems, we also discuss the effect of Poisson's ratio and Young's modulus mismatch on the crack path in a glass composite. From this study, it can been seen that the proposed approach requires a fewer number of elements when compared to uniform refinement to yield comparable results. The current implementation provides a starting point to an efficient framework to fracture problems for practical engineering with less experience with coding skills.