Validation tests of the full-discontinuous Galerkin / extrinsic cohesive law framework of Kirchhoff-Love shells

Due to its ability to account for discontinuities,
the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method presents two main
advantages for modeling crack initiations and propagation.
On the one hand, it provides an easy way to insert the cohesive
elements during the simulation and therefore avoids
the drawbacks inherent to the use of an extrinsic cohesive
law. On the other hand, the capture of complex crack path
requires very thin meshes and the recourse to a parallel implementation
of DG formulations exhibits a high scalability
of the resolution scheme.
Recently, the authors developed such a DG-fracture framework
for Kirchhoff-Love shells in the linear and non-linear
ranges. They proved that this framework dissipates, during
the fracture process, an amount of energy equal to the fracture
energy of the material and that the model is able to propagate
the crack with the right speed.
In this paper, novel numerical benchmarks are presented
to validate the method in various fracture conditions. The
two first ones include an initial notch and study the fracture
propagation under two different dynamic loadings (impact
and blast). The two other ones focus on the fragmentation
of initially unbroken specimens due to uniform expansion
in order to demonstrate the ability of the new framework to
model crack initiations. Results are in all cases in agreement
with the ones reported in the literature.