Failure of Brittle Materials Due to Crack Propogation

Many civil engineering materials collapse by the initiation and the development of cracks. The detection of the source of these cracks and the manner in which they spread up to and including the stage of failure is of prime importance. In this paper an incremental finite element method is used to detect the origin of the initial crack and to trace the formation and the propagation of subsequent cracks up to failure. Two types of elements are employed. These are the simple constant stress (or strain) triangle and the eight noded isoparametric element. The theoretical validity of the proposed method is studied and illustrative examples are given. Comparisons are made with experimentalobservation on uniform soilcement samples with or without cylindrical cavities.

K.I. Majid and K. Al-Hashimi