Open Access

Simulating high-cycle fatigue with continuum models offers the possibility to model stress-redistributions, consider 3Dstress states and simplifies extensions to multi-physics problems. The computational cost of conventional cycle-by-cycle time integrations is reduced by reformulating the fatigue problem as an ordinary differential equation for the material state and solving it with high-order adaptive time integration schemes. The computational cost of calculating the Change of the material state in one cycle is further reduced by a high-order fatigue-specific time integration. The approach is exemplarily demonstrated for a fatigue extension of the implicit gradient-enhanced damage model in 3D and compared to experimental Wöhler lines.

A key limitation of the most constitutive models that reproduce a Degradation of quasi-brittle materials is that they generally do not address issues related to fatigue. One reason is the huge computational costs to resolve each load cycle on the structural level. The goal of this paper is the development of a temporal Integration scheme, which significantly increases the computational efficiency of the finite element method in comparison to conventional temporal integrations. The essential constituent of the fatigue model is an implicit gradient-enhanced formulation of the damage rate. The evolution of the field variables is computed as amultiscale Fourier series in time.On a microchronological scale attributed to single cycles, the initial boundary value problem is approximated by linear BVPs with respect to the Fourier coefficients. Using the adaptive cycle jump concept, the obtained damage rates are transferred to a coarsermacrochronological scale associated with the duration of material deterioration. The performance of the developedmethod is hence improved due to an efficient numerical treatment of the microchronological problem in combination with the cycle jump technique on the macrochronological scale. Validation examples demonstrate the convergence of the obtained solutions to the reference simulations while significantly reducing the computational costs.

The problem of polydisperse sphere packings is applied to concrete mesoscale geometries in finite sized specimens. Realistic sphere diameter distributions are derived from concrete grading curves. An event-driven molecular dynamics simulation using growing particles is introduced. Compared to the widely used random sequential addition algorithm, it reaches denser aggregate packings and saves computation time at high volume fractions. A minimal distance between particles strongly influences the maximum aggregate content. It is essential to obtain undistorted elements when meshing the geometry for finite element simulations. The algorithm maximizes this value and produces meshable concrete mesostructures with more than 70% aggregate content.

Damage caused by stress concentrations in the complex mesoscopic geometry of concrete leads to continuous stress redistribution over the material's life time. The presented fatigue damage model captures this by resolving each load cycle in a cycle-by-cycle time integration. The model extends a static damage model to failure caused by the (time dependent) strain amplitudes and, thus, allows calibrating the majority of the material's parameters in static experiments.

Isotropic damage models are widely used for the finite element simulation of softening materials, e.g. in mesoscale simulations of concrete. Regularization techniques must be employed to obtain a physically meaningful fracture energy upon mesh refinement. In regularized local damage models the strains localize in single elements allowing them to represent weak or strong discontinuities. In implicit integration schemes, these models can exhibit convergence Problems caused by an ill-conditioned tangent stiffness. This corresponds to the loss of ellipticity of the local rate equilibrium equations. Oliver et al. developed the implicit/explicit (IMPL-EX) integration scheme which overcomes These problems in local damage models. The internal damage driving variable is extrapolated based on previous implicitly determined values. This provides two main benefits: First, it always results in a symmetric positive semi-definite algorithmic stiffness matrix which precludes ill-posedness. Second, the system becomes incrementally linear and converges in one Newton-Raphson iteration. Even though the IMPL-EX algorithm, like explicit algorithms in general, requires smaller time steps than implicit schemes to obtain the same accuracy, it leads to a computational speedup. The gradient enhanced damage model by Peerlings is a nonlocal damage model that provides the regularization by limiting the curvature of the damage-driving strains. These models do not lose their ellipticity. However, structural instabilities often require tiny time steps and many iterations to obtain convergence. Here, the second aspect of the IMPL-EX scheme reduces the computational costs. This is shown in simulations of the complex geometry of concrete mesostructures, where only the gradient enhanced matrix material and linear elastic aggregates are considered. With regard to future mesoscale simulations, the remaining component of the mesoscopic structure, the interfacial transition zone and its degradation, has to be included. This adds a local damage model to the nonlocal problem. Thus, an IMPL-EX implementation has to be provided for both models to benefit from the increase of robustness and performance.