ABSTRACT
Barrenblatt [1] to address the issue of the singularity of the crack tip field, CZM places ahead of the crack a nonlinear region governed by a cohesive failure law between the tractions resisting crack opening and the resulting displacement jump across the fracture surface. The approach regained a lot of attention two decades ago with the development of the cohesive finite element method, which incorporates the cohesive failure law in the constitutive response of interfacial (cohesive) elements placed between conventional (volumetric) finite elements [9, 16, 2, 4]. The cohesive finite element method has achieved remarkable success in the simulation of spontaneous crack propagation when the crack path is known a priori, such as in the failure of interfaces [15, 14, 8]. However, when the numerical method is used to model arbitrary crack growth, care must be exercised to address lattice dependency effects [12, 10, 17]. Nevertheless, CZM continues to be a valuable analysis tool in the study of fracture.
