Description:

Multi-phase field approach to tensile fracture and compressive
crushing in grained heterogeneous materials

BIO
Pietro Lenarda received his Master’s Degree in Mathematics at the University of Florence and his PhD in Computational Mechanics at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy. After a post-doc at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa at the Laboratory for Computational Nanomedicine, he became a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at IMT School for Advanced Studies Italy in 2023 within the Multiscale Analysis of Material (MUSAM) research unit directed by Prof. Marco Paggi.

He has been a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford, UK (2016), at the University of Seville, Spain (2022), and at the University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome (2017 and 2022).

His research focuses on computational methods for numerical solutions of nonlinear coupled phenomena in continuum mechanics, with particular applications to phase-field variational formulations for fracture mechanics.

ABSTRACT

Multi-phase field approach to tensile fracture and compressive crushing in grained heterogeneous materials

The variational phase-field approach to brittle fracture is extended to deal with the simultaneous interplay of two failure mechanisms affecting grained heterogeneous materials in compression—fracture in tension and crushing in compression. The problem is addressed within the context of a multi-phase field variational approach, with two independent damage variables associated with each failure mechanism.

The proposed computational method, implemented in the open-source FEniCS finite element software, is applied to 2D mesoscale models of concrete specimens in compression. The predicted trends for specimens with different aspect ratios and varying degrees of lateral confinement are consistent with experimental results on apparent compressive strength and with typically observed failure patterns.