Browsing by Author "Gürses, Ercan"

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Aspects of energy minimization in solid mechanics : evolution of inelastic microstructures and crack propagation
(2007) Gürses, Ercan; Miehe, Christian (Prof. Dr.-Ing.)
This work deals with theoretical energy minimization principles and the development of associated computational tools for the description of microstructure evolution and fracture in solid mechanics. The thesis consists of two parts: (i) The description of inelastic deformation microstructures and their evolution in non-convex unstable solids and (ii) the development of a variational framework for configurational-force-driven brittle fracture based on energy minimization principles. In the first part, a general framework is developed for the treatment of material instabilities and microstructure developments in inelastic solids. Material instabilities and microstructure developments are interpreted as the outcome of non(quasi)-convex variational problems which often suffer from the lack of solutions in the classical sense. The proposed framework is based on a mathematical relaxation theory which is associated with the replacement of non-quasiconvex potentials with their generalized convex envelopes. Furthermore, deformation microstructures and their evolution are studied for three different constitutive material responses: the symmetry-breaking martensitic phase transformations, the single-slip crystal plasticity and the isotropic damage mechanics. For this purpose specific numerical relaxation algorithms are proposed for each constitutive response. The performance of numerical relaxation schemes is presented by several representative examples. In the second part, a variational formulation of quasistatic brittle fracture in elastic solids is outlined and a finite-element-based computational framework is proposed for the two- and three-dimensional crack propagation. The starting point is a variational setting that recasts a monotonic quasistatic fracture process into a sequence of incremental energy minimization problems. The proposed numerical implementation exploits this variational structure. It introduces discretized crack patterns with configurational-force-driven incremental crack segment and crack surface releases. These releases of crack segments and surfaces constitute a sequence of positive definite subproblems with successively decreasing overall stiffness, providing an extremely robust algorithmic setting in the postcritical range. The formulation is embedded into an accompanying r-adaptive crack-pattern adjustment procedure with configurational-force-based indicators in conjunction with crack front constraints. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by means of several two- and three-dimensional crack propagation examples and comparisons with experiments.