Revisiting brittle fracture variationally
Gilles Francfort, Univ of Paris 13

Abstract:
A recent variational revisiting of fracture evolution sheds a new light on an old problem. Starting with a brief review of the classical theory , I will then describe the variational viewpoint and discuss its impact on crack initiation, as well as on crack path prediction. I will show how the approach is amenable to numerical implementation and demonstrate its predictive computational ability in 2 and 3 dimensional problems driven by diffusive cooling.