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A phantom-node method is developed for three-node shell elements to describe cracks. This method can treat arbitrary cracks independently of the mesh. The crack may cut elements completely or partially. Elements are overlapped on the position of the crack, and they are partially integrated to implement the discontinuous displacement across the crack. To consider the element containing a crack tip, a new kinematical relation between the overlapped elements is developed. There is no enrichment function for the discontinuous displacement field. Several numerical examples are presented to illustrate the proposed method.
Modern digital material approaches for the visualization and simulation of heterogeneous materials allow to investigate the behavior of complex multiphase materials with their physical nonlinear material response at various scales. However, these computational techniques require extensive hardware resources with respect to computing power and main memory to solve numerically large-scale discretized models in 3D. Due to a very high number of degrees of freedom, which may rapidly be increased to the two-digit million range, the limited hardware ressources are to be utilized in a most efficient way to enable an execution of the numerical algorithms in minimal computation time. Hence, in the field of computational mechanics, various methods and algorithms can lead to an optimized runtime behavior of nonlinear simulation models, where several approaches are proposed and investigated in this thesis.
Today, the numerical simulation of damage effects in heterogeneous materials is performed by the adaption of multiscale methods. A consistent modeling in the three-dimensional space with an appropriate discretization resolution on each scale (based on a hierarchical or concurrent multiscale model), however, still contains computational challenges in respect to the convergence behavior, the scale transition or the solver performance of the weak coupled problems. The computational efficiency and the distribution among available hardware resources (often based on a parallel hardware architecture) can significantly be improved. In the past years, high-performance computing (HPC) and graphics processing unit (GPU) based computation techniques were established for the investigationof scientific objectives. Their application results in the modification of existing and the development of new computational methods for the numerical implementation, which enables to take advantage of massively clustered computer hardware resources. In the field of numerical simulation in material science, e.g. within the investigation of damage effects in multiphase composites, the suitability of such models is often restricted by the number of degrees of freedom (d.o.f.s) in the three-dimensional spatial discretization. This proves to be difficult for the type of implementation method used for the nonlinear simulation procedure and, simultaneously has a great influence on memory demand and computational time.
In this thesis, a hybrid discretization technique has been developed for the three-dimensional discretization of a three-phase material, which is respecting the numerical efficiency of nonlinear (damage) simulations of these materials. The increase of the computational efficiency is enabled by the improved scalability of the numerical algorithms. Consequently, substructuring methods for partitioning the hybrid mesh were implemented, tested and adapted to the HPC computing framework using several hundred CPU (central processing units) nodes for building the finite element assembly. A memory-efficient iterative and parallelized equation solver combined with a special preconditioning technique for solving the underlying equation system was modified and adapted to enable combined CPU and GPU based computations.
Hence, it is recommended by the author to apply the substructuring method for hybrid meshes, which respects different material phases and their mechanical behavior and which enables to split the structure in elastic and inelastic parts. However, the consideration of the nonlinear material behavior, specified for the corresponding phase, is limited to the inelastic domains only, and by that causes a decreased computing time for the nonlinear procedure. Due to the high numerical effort for such simulations, an alternative approach for the nonlinear finite element analysis, based on the sequential linear analysis, was implemented in respect to scalable HPC. The incremental-iterative procedure in finite element analysis (FEA) during the nonlinear step was then replaced by a sequence of linear FE analysis when damage in critical regions occured, known in literature as saw-tooth approach. As a result, qualitative (smeared) crack initiation in 3D multiphase specimens has efficiently been simulated.
Meshfree methods (MMs) such as the element free Galerkin (EFG)method have gained popularity because of some advantages over other numerical methods such as the finite element method (FEM). A group of problems that have attracted a great deal of attention from the EFG method community includes the treatment of large deformations and dealing with strong discontinuities such as cracks. One efficient solution to model cracks is adding special enrichment functions to the standard shape functions such as extended FEM, within the FEM context, and the cracking particles method, based on EFG method. It is well known that explicit time integration in dynamic applications is conditionally stable. Furthermore, in enriched methods, the critical time step may tend to very small values leading to computationally expensive simulations. In this work, we study the stability of enriched MMs and propose two mass-lumping strategies. Then we show that the critical time step for enriched MMs based on lumped mass matrices is of the same order as the critical time step of MMs without enrichment. Moreover, we show that, in contrast to extended FEM, even with a consistent mass matrix, the critical time step does not vanish even when the crack directly crosses a node.