A micromechanics-based non-local anisotropic model for unilateral damage in brittle materials

The present Note is devoted to the formulation of a micromechanics-based model of non-local anisotropic damage and its application to concrete materials and structures. We first formulate a local anisotropic unilateral damage model on the basis of a suitable homogenization scheme which takes into account interactions between penny-shaped microcracks as well as their spatial distribution. The damage surface is built by using an energy release rate-based criterion. Then a non-local extension of the model is proposed by replacing the local energy release-rate for each family of microcracks by its average over a characteristic volume V of the material centered at a given point. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of the non-local model in mesh-independent simulation of failure process in structures, some applications concerning failure of concrete materials and structures are presented.