Comparison of fracture strain based ductile failure simulation with experimental results

This paper provides experimental validation of the approach for simulating ductile failure using finite element methods, recently proposed by the authors. The proposed method is based on a phenomenological stress-modified fracture strain model. Incremental damage is defined by the ratio of the plastic strain increment to the fracture strain, and total damage is calculated using linear summation. When the accumulated damage becomes unity, all stress components at the finite element gauss point are reduced to a small value to simulate progressive failure. The proposed method is validated against four experimental data sets of cracked specimens made of three different materials. Despite the simplicity of the proposed method, the simulated results agree well with experimental data for all cases considered, providing sufficient confidence in the use of the proposed method to simulate ductile failure. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.