Numerical prediction of slant fracture with continuum damage mechanics

Ductile specimens always exhibit an inclined fracture surface with an angle relative to the loading axis. This paper reports a numerical study on the cup-cone fracture mode in round bar tensile tests and the slant fracture in plane-strain specimens based on continuum damage mechanics. A combined implicit-explicit numerical scheme is first developed within ABAQUS through user defined material subroutines, in which the implicit solver: Standard, and the explicit solver: Explicit, are sequentially used to predict one single damage/fracture process. It is demonstrated that this numerical approach is able to significantly reduce computational cost for the simulation of fracture tests under quasi-static or low-rate loading. Comparison with various tensile tests on 2024-T351 aluminum alloy is made showing good correlations in terms of the load-displacement response and the fracture patterns. However, some differences exist in the prediction of the critical displacement to fracture. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.