Analysis of the failure at notches and cavities in quasi-brittle media using the Thick Level Set damage model and comparison with the coupled criterion

The failure of quasi-brittle specimen weakened by sharp or blunted notches and cavities is analyzed under quasi-static loading. The load at failure is obtained with the Thick Level Set (TLS) damage modeling. In this model, the damage gradient is bounded implying that the minimal distance between a point where damage 0 (sound material) to 1 (fully damaged) is an imposed characteristic length in the model. This length plays an important role on the damage evolution and on the failure load. The paper shows that the TLS predictions are relevant. A comparison with the coupled criterion (CC) of Leguillon (2002) is given. A good agreement is obtained for cavities and V-notches provided that the characteristic length of Irwin is small compared to the notch depth (condition for the applicability of the CC criterion). A comparison with failure loads obtained experimentally is also given. In the numerical simulations, uniform stresses are imposed at infinity using a new finite element mapping technique (Cloirec 2005). (authors)