An Integrated Approach for Statistical Microscale Homogenization to Macroscopic Dynamic Fracture Analysis

Maintaining material inhomogeneity and sample-to-sample variations is crucial in fracture analysis, particularly for quasibrittle materials. We use statistical volume elements (SVEs) to homogenize elastic and fracture properties of ZrB₂-SiC, a two-phase composite often used for thermal coating. At the mesoscale, a 2D finite element mesh is generated from the microstructure using the Conforming to Interface Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (CISAMR), which is a non-iterative algorithm that tracks material interfaces and yields high-quality conforming meshes with adaptive operations. Analyzing the finite element results of the SVEs under three traction loadings, elastic and angle-dependent fracture strengths of SVEs are derived. The results demonstrate the statistical variation and the size effect behavior for elastic bulk modulus and fracture strengths. The homogenized fields are mapped to macroscopic material property fields that are used for fracture simulation of the reconstructed domain under a uniaxial tensile loading by the asynchronous Spacetime Discontinuous Galerkin (aSDG) method.