Study of the mechanical behavior and multiscale simulation of the crack propagation in a bilinga wooden beam

The mechanical behavior of local wood species (Bilinga) in the south west region in Cameroon during rainy and dry seasons and the mechanical behavior of wooden beam under bend loading are studied. The three points flexural tests were used to determine the mechanical properties of the wood under study. ANSYS 2020 R1 finite element (FE) software is used for numerical simulations at a macroscopic level using one of the newer technologies called Smart crack growth, which was introduced in the 2019 version. The geometry was modeled in SolidWorks with an initial crack length of 4 and 8 mm introduced in each sample and then imported to ANSYS workbench for further analysis with ANSYS which has all the tools to perform linear fracture. The stress intensity factor (SIF) determines the fracture toughness of a material which is subjected to linear-elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) where a variable of the critical stress intensify is denoted as KIc. The fatigue crack growth was modeled using Paris’ law. The crack growth was simulated based on Mode I crack specimen with an initial crack length of 4 and 8 mm, respectively. The stochastic multiscale modeling of crack growth on meso- and microscale is used to compare the crack growth rate in the approach of a heterogeneous material and taking into account the microstructure and fracture mechanism of the Bilinga wood. The results of stochastic modeling of the crack growth in the array of cracks and pores of a characteristic size shows that the simulation is close to FE-modeling results. Therefore, the stochastic simulation of the crack growth in wood at meso- and microscale shows the lower local stress intensity factors and slower crack growth due to the existence of the scale-time hierarchy. The crack growth rate vcr at a macroscale ranges within 0.845 – 0.9 × 10–3 m/sec which corresponds to the macroscopic value of the fracture toughness KIc.