Modeling and simulation of cracking in quasi-fragile materials by using phase field method: Application to concrete

This paper is devoted to the application of Miehe method [3] to the case of damage in concrete, in the particular framework of multiscale mechanics using 3D representative elementary volumes (REVs) at the mesoscale. More specifically, this work consists in the treatment of instabilities in the crack propagation modeling in isotropic elastic solids, which may arise due to the dependency of Miehe scheme [3] with respect to the choice of time step. Our algorithm allows for modeling crack propagation within complex microstructures, in a robust manner that is independent of the choice of time step. Several cases of concrete mesostruc-tures exhibiting different aggregate shapes have been analyzed under classical tension and compression loadings.