Crack phase-field modeling of anisotropic rupture in fibrous soft tissues

Abstract

The estimation of rupture in fibrous soft tissues has emerged as a central task in medical monitoring and risk assessment of diseases such as aortic dissection and aneurysms. In an attempt to address the challenges we have established a computational framework within the context of crack phase-field modeling and proposed an energy-based anisotropic failure criterion based on the distinction of isotropic and anisotropic material responses. Numerically we compare that criterion with other anisotropic failure criteria, in particular we analyze their capability to describe an admissible failure surface and how a crack can be propagated. A canonical rate-dependent setting of the crack phase-field model is formulated and solved in a weak sense by a standard Galerkin procedure featuring a one-pass operator-splitting algorithm on the temporal side. The anisotropic failure criteria are tested according to their performance on reflecting an admissible initiation, and crack propagation with an emphasis placed upon the aortic dissection