Patent ID: 8479588

Claim:
A three dimensional crack and fracture morphology and propagation method for single directed surfaces, comprising the steps of: defining a collection of interacting particles; determining which particles are allowed to interact through a visibility condition, said visibility condition using a piece-wise surface object called a crack panel as a barrier to particle interaction; defining filaments by discretizing a through-thickness with self-similar particle distributions, the filament being an identifiable set of particles through the thickness of a directed surface where the direction of the filament is parallel to a normal of the directed surface; identifying a current crack tip, the crack tip being located on a filament and propagating between adjacent filaments; searching filaments in a vicinity of the current crack tip and assessing each filament for a value of an external damage measure; choosing a filament with the highest damage, and if said filament meets a failure criteria, identifying said filament as the next crack tip; splitting each particle on the current filament into two state preserving particles and inserting a crack panel from the current crack tip to the new crack tip separating the split particles; and updating the connectivity of the particles due to the new crack panel.