A relaxation‐based approach to damage modeling

Common material models that take into account softening effects due to damage have the problem of ill‐posed boundary value problems if no regularization is applied. This condition leads to a non‐unique solution for the resulting algebraic system and a strong mesh dependence of the numerical results. A possible solution approach to prevent this problem is to apply regularization techniques that take into account the non‐local behavior of the damage [1]. For this purpose a field function is often used to couple the local damage parameter to a non‐local level, in which differences between the local and non‐local parameter as well as the gradient of the non‐local parameter can be penalized. In contrast, we present a novel approach [2] to regularization that no longer needs a non‐local level but directly provides mesh‐independent results. Due to the new variational approach we are also able to improve the calculation times and convergence behavior. (© 2016 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)