Quasistatic fracture evolution

Abstract: Nonlocal quasistatic fracture evolution for interacting cracks is developed and supporting numerical examples are presented. The approach is implicit and is based on local stationarity and fixed point methods. It is proved that the fracture evolution decreases stored elastic energy with each load step as the cracks advance; provided the load increments are chosen sufficiently small. This is also seen in the numerical examples. The numerical examples include evolution of a straight crack, a crack propagating inside an L-shaped domain, and two offset inward propagating cracks.