A Revised Abaqus^® Procedure for Fracture Path Simulation Based on the Material Effort Criterion

This paper presents the results of computer simulations of fracture in three laboratory tests: the three-point bending of a notched beam cut from sandstone, the pull-out test of a self-undercutting anchor fixed in sandstone, and the pull-out test of a bar embedded in concrete. Five material failure criteria were used: Rankine, Coulomb-Mohr, Drucker-Prager, Ottosen-Podgórski, and Hoek-Brown. These criteria were implemented in the Abaqus^® FEA system to work with the crack propagation modeling method-extended finite element method (X-FEM). All criteria yielded similar force-displacement relationships and similar crack path shapes. The improved procedure gives significantly better, close-to-real crack propagation paths than can be obtained using the standard subroutines built into the Abaqus^® system.