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Phase-field modeling of fracture in variably saturated porous media

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Abstract

We propose a mechanical and computational model to describe the coupled problem of poromechanics and cracking in variably saturated porous media. A classical poromechanical formulation is adopted and coupled with a phase-field formulation for the fracture problem. The latter has the advantage of being able to reproduce arbitrarily complex crack paths without introducing discontinuities on a fixed mesh. The obtained simulation results show good qualitative agreement with desiccation experiments on soils from the literature.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the funding provided by the German Research Foundation DFG GRK-2075.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Applied Mechanics, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Pockelsstr. 3, 38106, Braunschweig, Germany

    T. Cajuhi & L. De Lorenzis

  2. Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, University of Padova, Via Marzolo 9, Padova, Italy

    L. Sanavia

Authors
  1. T. Cajuhi
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  2. L. Sanavia
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  3. L. De Lorenzis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to T. Cajuhi.

Appendix A

Appendix A

In order to check the accuracy of the results reported in the main body of the paper, which were obtained using an explicit staggered approach, the reference test and the test case with \(k_w=0.5\times 10^{-15}\hbox {m}^2\) were recomputed with 10 staggered iterations. The results are shown in this section. The comparison with the explicit cases (Figs. 7, 17) show that the phase-field evolution is not strongly affected by the number of staggered iterations (Figs. 18, 19).

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Cajuhi, T., Sanavia, L. & De Lorenzis, L. Phase-field modeling of fracture in variably saturated porous media. Comput Mech 61, 299–318 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00466-017-1459-3

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