A THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIMULATION OF BRITTLE SOLID FRACTURE

This paper describes an extension into three dimensions of an existing two-dimensional technique for simulating brittle solid fracture. The fracture occurs on a simulated solid created by "gluing" together space-filling polyhedral elements with compliant interelement joints. Such a material can be shown to have well-defined elastic properties. However, the "glue" can only support a specified tensile stress and breaks when that stress is exceeded. In this manner, a crack can propagate across the simulated material. A comparison with experiment shows that the simulation can accurately reproduce the size distributions for all fragments with linear dimensions greater than three element sizes.