Modelling Structural Material Damage Using the Cohesive Zone Approach Under Operational Conditions

This article is devoted to the prediction of the service life of selected structural materials under simulated operating conditions. Special attention is paid to the so-called representative volume element, which characterizes the damage behaviour, since it includes a critical number of microdefects. The overall damage prediction is based on the energy approach, and the development of damage comes from the traction separation laws; the shape of the damage varies for different materials. The calculations were performed using the extended finite element method (XFEM), where several minor modifications were made. This method has been successfully used in many areas of engineering sciences for research, simulation, and prediction of the behaviour of structures. XFEM reformulates the continuous boundary and initial value problems into similar variational forms instead of using the classical forms of differential equations. The simulation of fracture and damage phenomena is presented for two different materials: austenitic steel with a pronounced grain structure under creep (viscous) loading conditions and cement pasta reinforced with metal fibres under conditions of predominantly static loading.