Adaptive finite element simulation of fracture: from plastic deformation to crack propagation

Leon, Sofia

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/78583 Copy

Description

Title

Adaptive finite element simulation of fracture: from plastic deformation to crack propagation

Author(s)

Leon, Sofia

Issue Date

2015-02-04

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Paulino, Glaucio H.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Paulino, Glaucio H.

Committee Member(s)

• Elbanna, Ahmed
• Celes, Waldemar
• Foulk, James
• Jasiuk, Iwona

Department of Study

Civil & Environmental Eng

Discipline

Civil Engineering

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• graphics processing unit (GPU) computing
• mesh adaptivity
• dynamic fracture
• internal state variables
• cohesive zone modeling
• finite elements
• brittle fracture

Abstract

As engineers and scientists, we have a host of reasons to understand how structural systems fail. We may be able to improve the safety of buildings during natural disaster by designing more fracture resistant connectors, to lengthen the life span on industrial machinery by designing it to sustain very large deformation at high temperatures, or prepare evacuation procedures for populated areas in high seismic zones in the event of rupture in the earth's crust. In order to achieve a better understanding of how any of these structures fail, experimental, theoretical, and computational advances must be made. In this dissertation we will focus on computational simulation by means of the finite element method and will investigate topological and physical aspects of adaptive remeshing for two types of structural systems: quasi-brittle and ductile. For ductile systems, we are interested in modeling the large deformations that occur before rupture of the material. The deformations can be so large that element distortion can cause lack of numerical convergence. Thus, we present a remeshing and internal state variable mapping technique to enable large deformation modeling and alleviate mesh distortion. We perform detailed studies on the Lie-group interpolation and variational recovery scheme and conclude that the approach results in very limited numerical diffusions and is applicable for modeling systems with significant ductile distortion. For quasi brittle systems mesh adaptivity is the central theme as it is for the work on ductile systems. We investigate two- and three-dimensional problems on CPU and GPU systems with the main goals of either improving computational efficiency or fidelity of the final solution. We investigate quasi-brittle fracture by means of the inter-element extrinsic cohesive zone model approach in which interface elements capable of separating are adaptively inserted at bulk element facets when and where they are needed throughout the numerical simulation. The inter-element cohesive zone model approach is known to suffer from mesh bias. Thus, we utilize polygonal element meshes with adaptive splitting to improve the capability of the mesh to represent experimentally obtained fracture patterns. The fact that we utilize the efficient linear polygonal elements and only apply the adaptive element splitting where needed means that we also achieve improved computational efficiency with this approach. In the last half of the dissertation, we depart from the use of unstructured meshes and focus on the development of hierarchical mesh refinement and coarsening schemes on the structured 4k mesh in two and three dimensions. In three-dimensions, the size of the problem increases so rapidly that mesh adaptivity is critical to enable the simulation of large-scale systems. Thus, we develop the topological and physical aspects of the mesh refinement and coarsening scheme. The scheme is rigorously tested on two benchmark problems; both of which shows significant speed up over a uniform mesh implementation and demonstrate physically meaningful results. To achieve greater speed up, the adaptive mesh refinement and coarsening scheme on the 2D 4k mesh is mapped to a GPU architecture. Considerations for the numerical implementation on the massively parallel system are detailed. Further, a study on the impact of the parallelization of the dynamic fracture code is performed on a benchmark problem, and a statistical investigation reveals the validity of the approach. Finally, the benchmark example is extended to such that the speicmen dimensions matches that of the original experimental system. The speedup provided by the GPU allows us to model this large system in a pratical amount of time and ultimately allows us to investigate differences between the commonly used reduced-scale model and the actual experimental scale. This dissertation concludes with a summary of contribution and comments on potential future research directions. Appendices featuring scripts and codes are also included for the interested reader.

Graduation Semester

2015-5

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78583

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2015 Sofia Leon

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