## 1 Introduction  
To advance the aim of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, the utilisation of wood-based materials will contribute significantly due to wood's ability to store carbon. In the context of transportation, particularly electromobility, sustainability has become increasingly important in the last decade [1]. To minimise the CO\({}_{2}\) footprint of electromobility structures over their entire life cycle, attention is being directed towards sustainable materials such as wood. Opposed to state-of-the-art lightweight materials such as aluminium or fibre reinforced plastics, wood has a significantly lower carbon footprint. This reduces greenhouse gas emissions on the material level prior to production. Furthermore, lightweight construction holds significant importance in cutting down on in-service energy requirements. Wood, with its favourable combination of low density and good mechanical properties, presents a promising candidate for the use as a sustainable lightweight material in vehicle construction. Given the present reliance on simulation in the development of vehicle structures, it is essential to establish efficient simulation techniques for the safe and reliable design of thin wooden structures as a sustainable alternative in transport applications [1]. Over the past three decades, various engineered wood products, such as glue-laminated timber and cross-laminated timber, have gained widespread acceptance. Since these products require up to 45 mm thick boards, thinner alternatives in the form of laminated veneer lumber have been explored [2]. Recently, the integration of thin wooden panels into automotive door panels has been studied. [PERSON] et al. [3] and [PERSON] et al. [4] studied veneers in multi-material systems for future vehicle structures in the publicly funded project \"For(s)tschritt\" by the German federal ministry of economic affairs [1]. The study contained the development of a hybrid wood-steel structural component subjected to crash loads. A laminated veneer lumber beam, hybridised with thin steel strips, was shown to compensate the low elongation at fracture and ensure the structural integrity. Although the wood-steel hybrid beams showed high energy absorption and stable failure in the wooden component, they were not able to achieve the maximum deformation and exceeded the target weight as opposed to conventional steel beams used in current vehicle doors. Therefore, further optimisation is required to make wood-based materials a viable option for sustainable vehicle structures. This motivates the work presented in this paper, aiming to explore highly efficient simulations to design and certify future sustainable structures made from wood. It has been found that well-established mechanical tests developed for fibre-reinforced polymers (FRPs) can also be applied to thin wood veneer laminates [5], particularly when subjected to tensile loads [6]. The results of standard tensile, compact tension, and open-hole tension tests indicate that it is possible to characterise the elastic and strength properties, as well as the damage resistance, of these materials. As the mechanical behaviours of FRPs and wood veneer laminates under tensile loads are comparable, these experimental findings motivate the present study to adopt efficient finite element (FE) simulation methods from FRPs to thin wooden materials. Finite element analysis (FEA) of progressive damage can be broadly categorised into discrete or continuous methods. Discrete approaches directly integrate fracture into the FE formulation. The cohesive zone model (CZM), a fracture energy-based approach, is the most commonly utilised discrete tool in FEA and is typically available in most commercial FE software packages. To eliminate the need for prior knowledge of crack paths in CZM, more advanced enrichment techniques based on the partition of unity have been developed for mesh-independent modelling of arbitrary fractures [7; 8].