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Computational fracture and failure of materials and structures

Guest Editors: 

  • Olivier Allix (ENS Cachan, Gif-sur-Yvette, France)
  • Nicolas Moës (Ecole Centrale Nantes, Nantes, France)

The purpose of this special issue is to survey some recent advances in the modeling of  fracture and failure of materials and structures. Designers of engineering structures must answer to ever increasing requests on performance in terms of safety, reliability, durability, low cost and low energy consumption. As new materials and new applications arise, traditional design rules and conventional testing methods become insufficient or inapplicable, which strengthens the role of modeling approaches  and computational methods  in the design process. Numerical tools and efficient models can accelerate the development of new products and their optimization. The special issue addresses a variety of topics: crack tracking algorithms, advances in the experiment-modeling dialog, relations between fracture and contact mechanics, dynamic fracture, fracture and damage of composites, fracture in mutli-phase materials, and ductile failure.


  1. A series of experiments has been performed to build a benchmark for the numerical modeling of mixed mode crack propagation in concrete. Two tests are selected so that the propagation is almost always stable al...

    Authors: Andreea Carpiuc, Martin Poncelet, Julien Réthoré and Stéphane Roux
    Citation: Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 2018 5:24
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  2. The mechanical response of IM7-8552 carbon epoxy was investigated for transverse tension and transverse tension/in-plane shear loadings at static and dynamic strain rates using transverse tension and off-axis ...

    Authors: Hannes Koerber, Peter Kuhn, Marina Ploeckl, Fermin Otero, Paul-William Gerbaud, Raimund Rolfes and Pedro P. Camanho
    Citation: Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 2018 5:17
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  3. In this work, the analogous treatment between coupled temperature–displacement problems and material failure models is explored within the context of a commercial software (Abaqus®). The implicit gradient Lema...

    Authors: E. Azinpour, J. P. S. Ferreira, M. P. L. Parente and J. Cesar de Sa
    Citation: Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 2018 5:15
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  4. Recent advancements on the variational approach to fracture for the prediction of complex crack patterns in heterogeneous materials and composite structures is herein proposed, as a result of the frontier rese...

    Authors: V. Carollo, T. Guillén-Hernández, J. Reinoso and M. Paggi
    Citation: Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 2018 5:8
    Content type: Review Published on:

  5. In this paper, two nonlocal approaches to incorporate interface damage in fast Fourier transform (FFT) based spectral methods are analysed. In FFT based methods, the discretisation is generally non-conforming ...

    Authors: Luv Sharma, Ron H. J. Peerlings, Pratheek Shanthraj, Franz Roters and Marc G. D. Geers
    Citation: Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 2018 5:7
    Content type: Research article Published on: