Aspects of ductile fracture and adaptive mesh refinement in damaged elasto-plastic materials

Numerical simulation of elasto-plastic problems involving multi-fracturing materials requires a reliable failure prediction technique and a robust sol ution algorithm. This work approaches ductile fracture by means of continuu m damage mechanics, from which two new failure criteria based on coupled an d uncoupled damage analysis are derived. A two-parameter stress update algo rithm for damaged materials based on a Newton-Raphson iterative procedure i s presented. A posteriori error estimators using ductile failure concepts a re also discussed. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.