Modelling fracture process in ceramic materials using the Material Point Method

The Material Point Method (MPM) is a mathematical procedure based on the particle-in-cell technique, which combines the advantages of the Finite Element Method and the particle dynamics simulations. As all the material properties are transported by the points, a static structured mesh is used as a background scratch-pad for computations. This feature depicts MPM as a true meshless method, where the mesh entanglements (dependency or re-meshing) are avoided. Recently, MPM has been successfully applied to study the arbitrary crack propagation in solids. In this work, we focus our interest on a particular two-dimensional case in which a single crack initiates and propagates in a hypothetic multiphase system consisting of various quartz particles embedded in a glassy phase. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2011