Collection
Phase-Field Approaches to Fracture in the 3rd Millennium
More than twenty years after their introduction as approximations of the variational theory of brittle fracture (Francfort and Marigo, 1998), phase-field models of fracture (Bourdin et al., 2000) have emerged as powerful macroscopic approaches to describe and predict the propagation of cracks in homogeneous linear elastic isotropic brittle materials under quasistatic loading conditions.
Recent developments of phase-field formulations to account for material heterogeneity, nonlinearity, inelasticity, anisotropy, multi-physics, and dynamic loading conditions, as well as to incorporate fracture nucleation and healing point to the core concept behind the theory — i.e., the competition between bulk and surface fields — as a truly pervasive idea capable of describing, explaining, and predicting fracture in a broad spectrum of materials and loading conditions.
This Special Issue aims at providing a snapshot of the state of the art as well as an outlook of the future for the field.
Editors
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Oscar Lopez-Pamies
Oscar Lopez-Pamies is a Professor at the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is interested in the mechanics and physics of heterogeneous materials with a particular emphasis on soft-matter systems.
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Blaise Bourdin
Blaise Bourdin is a Professor at the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at McMaster University. His research focusses on modeling, analysis, and numerical implementations of problems arising in reservoir engineering, defect mechanics, optimal design, and image processing.
