Regularized formulation of the variational brittle fracture with unilateral contact: Numerical experiments

This paper presents a modified regularized formulation of the Ambrosio–Tortorelli type to introduce the crack non-interpenetration condition in the variational approach to fracture mechanics proposed by Francfort and Marigo [1998. Revisiting brittle fracture as an energy minimization problem. J. Mech. Phys. Solids 46 (8), 1319–1342]. We focus on the linear elastic case where the contact condition appears as a local unilateral constraint on the displacement jump at the crack surfaces. The regularized model is obtained by splitting the strain energy in a spherical and a deviatoric parts and accounting for the sign of the local volume change. The numerical implementation is based on a standard finite element discretization and on the adaptation of an alternate minimization algorithm used in previous works. The new regularization avoids crack interpenetration and predicts asymmetric results in traction and in compression. Even though we do not exhibit any gamma-convergence proof toward the desired limit behavior, we illustrate through several numerical case studies the pertinence of the new model in comparison to other approaches.