Investigations on the influence of the boundary conditions when computing the effective crack energy of random heterogeneous materials using fast marching methods

Recent stochastic homogenization results for the Francfort-Marigo model of brittle fracture under anti-plane shear indicate the existence of a representative volume element. This homogenization result includes a cell formula which relies on Dirichlet boundary conditions. For other material classes, the boundary conditions do not effect the effective properties upon the infinite volume limit but may have a strong influence on the necessary size of the computational domain. We investigate the influence of the boundary conditions on the effective crack energy evaluated on microstructure cells of finite size. For periodic boundary conditions recent computational methods based on FFT-based solvers exploiting the minimum cut/maximum flow duality are available. In this work, we provide a different approach based on fast marching algorithms which enables a liberal choice of the boundary conditions in the 2D case. We conduct representative volume element studies for two-dimensional fiber reinforced composite structures with tough inclusions, comparing Dirichlet with periodic boundary conditions.

Automated summary

This study investigates the influence of boundary conditions on the effective crack energy evaluated on microstructure cells and provides a different approach based on fast marching algorithms which allows a liberal choice of boundary conditions.