Scale selection in nonlinear fracture mechanics of heterogeneous materials

A new adaptive multiscale method for the non-linear fracture simulation of heterogeneous materials is proposed. The two major sources of errors in the finite element simulation are discretization and modelling errors. In the failure problems, the discretization error increases due to the strain localization which is also a source for the error in the homogenization of the underlying microstructure. In this paper, the discretization error is controlled by an adaptive mesh refinement procedure following the Zienkiewicz–Zhu technique, and the modelling error, which is the resultant of homogenization of microstructure, is controlled by replacing the macroscopic model with the underlying heterogeneous microstructure. The scale adaptation criterion which is based on an error indicator for homogenization is employed for our non-linear fracture problem. The control of both discretization and homogenization errors is the main feature of the proposed multiscale method.