Investigation of concrete cracking phenomena by using cohesive fracture-based techniques: A comparison between an embedded crack model and a refined diffuse interface model

Cracking simulation in concrete-like structures is the subject of numerous investigations of computational kind, in which different modeling techniques based on either smeared or discrete fracture approaches have been proposed. In this work, two different finite element-based cohesive fracture models, proposed by some of the authors and belonging to the discrete approaches, have been compared: (i) a novel refined diffuse interface model and (ii)...