HIGHER-ORDER DISCONTINUOUS MODELING OF FRACTURING IN CONCRETE USING THE NUMERICAL MANIFOLD METHOD

This paper presents an overview of the numerical manifold method (NMM) as a unifying framework for modeling fracturing phenomena in quasi-brittle materials, and particularly in concrete. NMM is attractive due to its potential to provide an efficient framework for modeling the entire transition between continuum to discontinuum, from a continuum point of view, without remeshing. To achieve this, the following characteristics are employed: (1) discontinuities are introduced in a discrete manner, without remeshing; (2) the approximation is improved locally, for any arbitrary level, without remeshing. Furthermore, essential boundary conditions are enforced using projection matrices and higher-order boundary issues are identified.