GRADIENT-ENHANCED DAMAGE FOR QUASI-BRITTLE MATERIALS

Conventional continuum damage descriptions of material degeneration su ffer from loss of well-posedness beyond a certain level of accumulated damage. As a consequence, numerical solutions are obtained which are unacceptable from a physical point of view. The introduction of higher -order deformation gradients in the constitutive model is demonstrated to be an adequate remedy to this deficiency of standard damage models . A consistent numerical solution procedure of the governing partial; differential equations is presented, which is shown to be capable of p roperly simulating localization phenomena.