The three dimensional extended bridging domain method for brittle fracture

Abstract

In this paper, a concurrent multiscale method for coupling the three dimensional continuum and molecular dynamics domain is presented. The coupling method is based on the Bridging Domain method. To handle discontinuities in continuum domain, the extended finite element method (XFEM) is used. The Lennard-Jones potential is used to model the interactions in the atomistic domain and the Cauchy-Born method is used to compute the material behaviour in the continuum domain. To show the productivity and applicability of the proposed method, two different three dimensional crack examples were modeled. The results show that the method is capable of handling dislocation nucleation and crack propagation in the three dimensional space.