Phase-field study of the effective fracture energy increase during dynamic crack propagation in disordered heterogeneous materials

The propagation of a three-dimensional crack in a heterogeneous material is studied using a phase-field model. It is shown that, in the case of randomly distributed inclusions of soft material in a matrix, the nature of the distribution has little effect on the effective elastic properties. However, it significantly affects crack propagation. The less uniform distribution leads to higher thresholds for crack propagation.