Scalable Visual Simulation of Ductile and Brittle Fracture

Fracture of solid objects produces debris. Modelling the physics that produces the broken fragments from the original solid requires an increase in the number of degrees of freedom. This causes a huge increase in computational cost for FEM based methods used to model such phenomena. We present a graph-based FEM method that tackles this issue by relabeling the edges of the graph induced in a volumetric mesh, using a damage variable. We reformulate the system dynamics for this relabelled graph in order to simulate the fracture mechanics using FEM without an explosion in the computation cost. Our method therefore requires no remeshing of the volumetric mesh used for computation and this makes it very scalable to high-resolution meshes. We demonstrate that the method can simulate both brittle and ductile fracture.