A new specialised finite element for simulating the cracking and healing behaviour of quasi-brittle materials is presented. The element employs a strong discontinuity approach to represent displacement jumps associated with cracks. A particular feature of the work is the introduction of healing into the element formulation. The healing variables are introduced at the element level, which ensures consistency with the internal degrees freedom that represent the crack; namely, the crack opening, crack sliding and rotation. In the present work, the element is combined with a new cohesive zone model to simulate damage-healing behaviour and implemented with a crack tracking algorithm. To demonstrate the performance of the new element and constitutive models, a convergence test and two validation examples are presented that consider the response of a vascular self-healing cementitious material system for three different specimens. The examples show that the model is able to accurately capture the cracking and healing behaviour of this type of self-healing material system with good accuracy.

中文翻译：

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用于模拟自修复准脆性材料的专用有限元

提出了一种新的用于模拟准脆性材料开裂和愈合行为的有限元。该单元采用强不连续性方法来表示与裂纹相关的位移跳跃。这项工作的一个特殊特征是将治愈方法引入元素配方中。在元素级别引入修复变量，以确保与表示裂缝的内部自由度保持一致；即裂纹的开放，裂纹的滑动和旋转。在目前的工作中，该元素与一个新的内聚区模型相结合以模拟损伤修复行为，并使用裂纹跟踪算法来实现。为了演示新元素​​和本构模型的性能，提出了收敛性测试和两个验证示例，这些示例考虑了三种不同标本的血管自修复胶凝材料系统的响应。实例表明，该模型能够准确地捕获此类自修复材料系统的破裂和愈合行为。