Numerical Studies of Different Mixed Phase-Field Fracture Models for Simulating Crack Propagation in Punctured EPDM Strips

Abstract

We consider a monolithic phase-field description for fractures in nearly incompressible materials, i.e., carbon black filled ethylene propylene diene monomer rubber (EPDM). A quasi-static phasefield fracture problem is formulated in mixed form based on three different energy functionals (AT2, AT1 and Wu’s model) combined with two different stress splitting approaches (according to Miehe and Amor). It leads to six different phase-field fracture formulations in mixed form. The coupled variational inequality systems are solved in a quasi-monolithic manner with the help of a primal-dual active set method handling the inequality constraint. Further, adaptive mesh refinement is used to get a sharper crack zone. Numerical results based on the six different problem setups are validated on crack propagation experiments of punctured EPDM strips with five different test configurations. As a quantity of interest, the crack paths of experiments and numerical computations are discussed.

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