A multi-cracked particle method for complex fracture problems in 2D

Practical fracture problems are characterised by complex patterns of multiple and branching cracks, somewhat far removed from the fracture problems used for validation of numerical methods, involving single cracks, and the simulation of complex multi-tipped cracks brings many challenges to current numerical methods. The cracking particle method (CPM) incorporates the description of a crack path into the meshless nodes or particles used to discretise a problem domain. The CPM has recently been improved to make the crack paths continuous and to include adaptivity. In this paper we take this improved CPM further and introduce new crack particles which can model multiple fractures to handle crack branches and crack junctions without the need for any specialised techniques such as enrichment. Some examples with complex crack patterns are tested to show the performance of the proposed methodology and good results are obtained which agree well with previous papers.