A length scale insensitive phase-field damage model for brittle fracture

Being able to model complex nucleation, propagation, branching and merging of cracks in solids within a unified framework, the classical phase-field models for brittle fracture fail in predicting length scale independent global responses for a solid lacking elastic singularities (e.g., corners, notches, etc.). Motivated from Barenblatt’s approximation of Griffith’s brittle fracture with a vanishing Irwin’s internal length, this paper extends our...