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Prediction of crack growth is one of the greatest achievements of continuum mechanics in 20th century. However, in spite of Griffith’s achievements, nowadays lots of subjects remain unchallenged in the field of Fracture Mechanics. Concrete and asphalt concrete are two of the most popular material in civil engineering and crack growth prediction in these materials are very important. Cohesive crack model is one of the models which is used for prediction of crack growth in quasi-brittle material such as concrete and it has been used widely in recent years because of simplicity and good agreement with experiment.The aim of this thesis is three-dimensional static and dynamic cohesive modeling of... 

Crack nucleation and growth is unfavorable in many industrial and every day-life cases. designers’ effort is to prevent or delay it by taking into account safety and maintenance considerations; but in some industrial operations, the main target is to form a crack in a part to achieve a particular shape; and designers’ duty is to control the way it happens. so numerical modeling of this phenomena has many useful applications in preventing the structures’ failure and designing the production processes for industrial goods; and because of this, a great attention has been paid to it in the last two decades. a situation usually encountered in every day-life is the earthquake excitation which... 

Under Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM) assumptions, the stress at the crack tip is theoretically infinite. Clearly all materials have a finite strength, thus there will always be a plastified zone around the crack tip. If the size of plastic zone is not small compared to the crack size, then linear elastic assumptions are not applicable and a nonlinear model must be used. This damaged zone is referred to as a plastic zone for metals, and a fracture process zone for cementitious materials and ceramics. In this regard a discrete extrinsic cohesive crack model with bilinear traction separation constitutive law, i.e. softening function, is employed and crack propagation is investigated.... 

Numerical methods in fracture and crack propagation problems usually involve high computational costs. Adaptive finite element method is one of the techniques which can be used to simulate the crack propagation with an acceptable accuracy. In this thesis, various constitutive models are implemented for simulation of fracture, including the linear elastic fracture mechanics, cohesive zone model and continuum damage mechanics. The fracture mechanical evaluation is performed on a general integral technique for non-planar curved cracks in LEFM. In the second model, a bilinear cohesive zone model is applied to implement the traction-separation law. The Lemaitre damage model is employed and the...