Cracking elements method for dynamic brittle fracture

The cracking elements (CE) method is a recently presented self-propagating strong discontinuity embedded approach with the statically optimal symmetric (SDA-SOS) formulation for simulating the fracture of quasi-brittle materials. CE uses disconnected cracking segments to represent cracks, and the crack openings are condensed locally; hence, this method does not require remeshing, a cover algorithm or nodal enrichment. Furthermore, local criteria for determining the crack orientations are presented, thus making crack tracking unnecessary. In this paper, we propose a CE numerical procedure for dynamic fractures. Several benchmark tests regarding irregular discretizations are performed, and the results indicate that the CE method is capable of naturally capturing complicated crack patterns in dynamic fractures, including crack branchings.