Stable Cracking Particles Method Based on Stabilized Nodal Integration and Updated Lagrangian Kernel

A stable cracking particles method (CPM) based on updated Lagrangian kernels is proposed. The idea of CPM is to model the crack topology by a set of cracked particles. Hence no representation of the crack surface is needed making the method useful for problems involving complex fracture patterns as they occur in dynamics and under fast loading conditions. For computational efficiency, nodal integration is exploited in the present paper. In order to avoid instabilities, a scheme is presented to stabilized the integration. Moreover, a set of simple cracking rules are proposed in order to prevent numerical fracture. The method is applied to two benchmark problems and shows good accuracy.