A phase field model for damage in elasto-viscoplastic materials

A phase field method for brittle fracture is formulated for a finite strain elasto-viscoplastic material using a novel obstacle phase field energy model. The obstacle energy model results in a crack profile with compact support, and thus gives a physically realistic description of the material behaviour at the vicinity of the crack tip. The resulting variational inequality is discretised by a finite element method, and is efficiently solved using a reduced space NEWTON method. The solution, accuracy and numerical performance of this method is compared with a conventional phase field energy model for brittle fracture through representative examples, and a significant reduction in the numerical solution cost is demonstrated. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.