Fracture behaviour of brittle fibre-reinforced solids by a new FE formulation

Fibre-reinforced materials are nowadays used in many different fields of applications due to their good load bearing capacity under general stress state and to their fracture and fatigue resistance. The use of reinforcing fibres, especially in brittle or quasi-brittle materials, generally allows a reduction of the manufacturing costs and to get more elevated performance with respect to traditional materials. In the present paper, a continuum finite element (FE) formulation to analyse fracture mechanics problems for fibre-reinforced and in plain brittle or quasi-brittle materials involving discontinuity of the displacement field is developed. By employing an energy approach, an appropriate stress field correction is introduced to simulate the displacement discontinuity (crack) and the mechanical effects of the fibres on the matrix material, and a new FE formulation is used to simulate the behaviour of such a class of materials. Finally, some simple 2D examples are presented in order to evaluate the capability of the proposed computational approach. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.