Damage Investigation in PMMA Polymer: Experimental and Phase-Field Approaches

The prediction of crack patterns is one of the main tasks in the field of fracture mechanics in order to prevent the total damage of various materials, particularly Methyl Methacrylate Polymer (PMMA). The few data in the literature underscores the need for additional experiments on PMMA to analyze the performance of the phase-field approach to predict crack trajectories. The main purpose of this study is to verify the accuracy of the phase-field approach with a staggered scheme, based on spectral decomposition, for predicting crack propagation in PMMA specimens by comparing it with the experimental results presented in this work. Based on the tensile test and SEM analysis, this material exhibits brittle behavior. The numerical approach considers cracks as diffuse damage rather than sharp discontinuities, enabling a more accurate representation of brittle fracture processes. Experimental determination of material properties is used in the development of the numerical model. The main aim of these experiments is to explore how variations in load and specific geometries influence fracture initiation and crack trajectory. Consequently, these experiments will establish a dataset to further validate numerical advancements.