Topological search of the crack pattern from a continuum mechanical computation

• The purpose of the presented algorithm is to retrieve the crack path out of a continuum numerical model.
• The algorithm is the first step of a larger procedure aiming at retrieving the crack opening and computing leakage.
• The algorithm finds the ridges of the geometrical space generated by damage or an equivalent scalar variable.
• The algorithm is applied successfully to two examples.
• Retrieving crack paths helps to assess convergence of the damage model upon mesh refinement by comparing crack paths.

In this contribution, a method to track the crack path from a continuum finite element simulation using failure material models is presented. The work belongs to a larger project, aiming at extracting the crack opening a posteriori of a continuum finite element computation to deal with durability assessment of concrete structures. Cracking is modelled in a diffuse manner by a distribution of an appropriate scalar state variable associated to material degradation. With the proposed method, the crack path is found in the post-processing phase by means of a step-by-step procedure. At each step, a new location point is computed where the state variable is maximum in a given direction at a given distance. Furthermore a specific procedure is proposed to detect multiple cracks in an automatic way. The proposed method is successfully applied to two studies implying either a single crack or a multi-crack pattern, obtained with different continuum models to highlight the versatility of the proposed approach.