A penny-shaped cohesive crack model for material damage

A novel micromechanics based damage model is proposed to address failure mechanism of defected solids with randomly distributed penny-shaped cohesive micro-cracks (Barenblatt–Dugdale type). Energy release contribution to the material damage process is estimated in a representative volume element (RVE) under macro hydrostatic stress state. Macro-constitutive relations of RVE are derived via self-consistent homogenization scheme, and they are characterized by effective nonlinear elastic properties and a class of pressure sensitive plasticity which depends on crack opening volume fraction and Poisson s ratio. Several distinguished features of the present model are compared with Gurson model and Gurson–Tvergaard–Needleman (GTN) model, showing that the proposed model can better capture material degradation and catastrophic failure due to cohesive micro-crack growth and coalescence. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.