Abstract:

A phase field model for anti-plane shear crack growth in two dimensional isotropic elastic material is proposed. We introduce a phase field to represent the shape of the crack with a regularization parameter $\epsilon >0$ and we approximate the Francfort--Marigo type energy using the idea of Ambrosio and Tortorelli. The phase field model is derived as a gradient flow of this regularized energy. We show several numerical examples of the crack growth computed with an adaptive mesh finite element method.