The discontinuous strain method: accurately representing fatigue and failure

Fatigue simulation requires accurate modeling of unloading and reloading. However, classical ductile damage models treat deformations after complete failure as irrecoverable—which leads to unphysical behavior during unloading. This unphysical behavior stems from the continued accumulation of plastic strains after failure, resulting in an incorrect stress state at crack closure. As a remedy, we introduce a discontinuous strain in the additive elasto-plastic strain decomposition, which absorbs the excess strain after failure. This allows representing pre- and post-cracking regimes in a fully continuous setting, wherein the transition from the elasto-plastic response to cracking can be triggered at any arbitrary stage in a completely smooth manner. Moreover, the presented methodology does not exhibit the spurious energy release observed in hybrid approaches. In addition, our approach guarantees mesh-independent results by relying on a characteristic length scale—based on the discretization’s resolution. We name this new methodology the discontinuous strain method. The proposed approach requires only minor modifications of conventional plastic-damage routines. To convey the method in a didactic manner, the algorithmic modifications are first discussed for one- and subsequently for two-/three-dimensional implementations. Using a simple ductile constitutive model, the discontinuous strain method is validated against established two-dimensional benchmarks. The method is, however, independent of the employed constitutive model. Elastic, plastic, and damage models may thus be chosen arbitrarily. Furthermore, computational efforts associated with the method are minimal, rendering it advantageous for accurately representing low-cycle fatigue but potentially also for other scenarios requiring a discontinuity representation within a plastic-damage framework. An open-source implementation is provided to make the proposed method accessible.