BIFURCATIONS AND INSTABILITIES IN FRACTURE OF COHESIVE-SOFTENING STRUCTURES - A BOUNDARY ELEMENT ANALYSIS

The "cohesive-crack model" is adopted, together with the hypotheses of small deformations and linear elasticity outside the process zone or "craze", for the simulation of fracture processes in structures of concrete-like materials. A "direct", collocation, multidomain boundary element method is employed and shown to be computationally effective in the considered situations, which are characterized by non-linearity on interfaces only. Iterative algorithms for the direction search and interface adjustment in propagation analysis and for the determination of the response to a craze-tip advancement are developed and numerically tested. Softening as an instabilizing factor embodied in the cohesive-crack model may give rise to path bifurcations ("equilibrium branching"), instability under load control and intrinsic ("snapback") instability. These phenomena are analysed by the proposed boundary element procedure and discussed.