Dynamic crack growth in orthotropic brittle materials using an adaptive phase-field modeling with variable-node elements.

In this paper, crack growth in orthotropic materials subjected to dynamic loading is numerically studied using an adaptive phase-field method. The study starts with a coarse structured mesh and the adaptive refinement strategy based on a user-defined threshold on the phase-field variable is proposed for computational efficiency, and variable-node elements are employed to treat the hanging nodes as a result of local adaptive refinement. The Hughes-Hilbert-Taylor (HHT) time integration scheme is adopted for temporal discretization. The directionality of orthotropic materials is represented by a penalized second-order structural matrix, which is incorporated in the crack face energy density. Through numerical examples, the influence of the material orientation on the dynamic crack growth in orthotropic materials is studied and the reliability of the proposed framework is validated. • An adaptive PFM is proposed to simulate dynamic crack growth in orthotropic materials. • Time integration method HHT is combined with a staggered solving scheme. • A robust local adaptive refinement strategy is used based on a phase-field threshold. • Variable-node elements are used to overcome incompatibility in the refined mesh. • Performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated by numerical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]