A Comparative Study of Meshfree Methods for Fracture.

We study the ability of different meshfree methods for modeling fracture problems. Since our final goal is modeling dynamic fracture, we limit our studies to the most popular methods in this field, that is, the material point method (MPM), smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and element-free Galerkin (EFG) method. We demonstrate through several examples that Eulerian kernel formulation are not capable of modeling fracture correctly. Moreover, we show that it is not true that for such formulations fracture occurs naturally without any special treatment as often claimed in the literature. Moreover, we show the influence of several fracture criteria and post-localization models on the accuracy of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]