Modeling fracture in large scale shell structures

We consider a problem of modeling fracture and failure preceded by large scale yielding of ductile shells from the point of view of large-scale structural analysis. We place a special emphasis on the computational efficiency of the constitutive formulation. In this context, we seek the formulation embedded in the shell mechanics framework, which is both theoretically sound and easily implementable into a large-scale explicit dynamic finite element code without precluding vectorization or parallelization. This is achieved through the elasto-plastic damage constitutive model for finite-element analysis of plates and shells. The proposed damage model is purely phenomenological with a scalar damage parameter, which has no physical interpretation, except that it represents on a global scale the micromechanical changes the material undergoes during the process of necking and fracture. The localization leading to softening and fracture is represented by the damage calibration function with exponential damage growth after the onset of necking. The proposed phenomenological damage model uses a general plasticity and shell mechanics frameworks which makes it general and easily implementable into existing finite element codes. The proposed formulation has been implemented into the explicit dynamic finite element software code EPSA (Atkatsh et al., 1980, 1983).