This paper addresses a novel continuum damage‐based method for simulating failure process of quasi‐brittle materials starting from local damage initiation to final fracture. In the developed method, the preset characteristic length field is used to evaluate damage instead of element, which is used to reduce the spurious sensitivity. In addition, damage is only updated in the most dangerous location at a time for considering stress redistribution due to damage evolution, which is used to simulate competitive fracture process. As cases study, representative numerical simulations of two benchmark tests are given to verify the performance of the developed continuum damage‐based method together with a used damage model. The simulation results of the crack paths for two concrete specimens obtained from the developed method matched well with the corresponding experimental results. The results show that the developed continuum damage‐based method is effective and can be used to simulate damage and fracture process of brittle or quasi‐brittle materials. And the simulation results based on the developed method depend only the preset characteristic length field and not grid mesh.

中文翻译：

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准脆性材料断裂模拟的连续损伤力学方法

本文提出了一种基于连续损伤的新型方法，用于模拟准脆性材料从局部损伤开始到最终断裂的破坏过程。在开发的方法中，预设的特征长度字段用于评估损坏，而不是元素，从而降低了寄生灵敏度。另外，一次只在最危险的位置更新损坏，以考虑由于损坏演变而引起的应力重新分布，这可用于模拟竞争性断裂过程。作为案例研究，给出了两个基准测试的代表性数值模拟，以验证已开发的基于连续损伤的方法以及使用的损伤模型的性能。用该方法得到的两个混凝土试件的裂纹路径模拟结果与相应的实验结果吻合良好。结果表明，所开发的基于连续损伤的方法是有效的，可用于模拟脆性或准脆性材料的损伤和断裂过程。基于所开发方法的仿真结果仅取决于预设的特征长度场，而不取决于网格。