Creep crack analysis of viscoelastic material by numerical manifold method

In order to gain an insight into creep induced cracking in viscoelastic materials, the creep crack phenomenon in viscoelastic materials are numerically investigated in this paper based on the numerical manifold method (NMM). To more realistically capture the mechanical behaviour in the vicinity of crack tips, the local displacements around crack tips are enriched with the viscoelastic crack-tip asymptotic displacement field. To better represent the viscoelastic materials, an incremental viscoelastic constitutive law based on the generalized Kelvin-Voigt model is incorporated into the NMM. To achieve these treatments in the NMM, an incremental viscoelastic NMM formulation is derived. In addition, an incremental formulation of the mixed mode viscoelastic energy release rate (ERR), which can be tackled in the same process with the incremental viscoelastic constitutive law, is derived and incorporated into the NMM for investigating the variations of the ERR in viscoelastic materials. Based on the developed method, three creep crack problems with different loading conditions and pre-existing crack configurations are simulated, and the crack opening and sliding displacements as well as corresponding mixed mode ERR are analysed. Simulation results show good agreement with the theoretical solutions, which indicate that the proposed NMM is suitable for complex creep crack problems.