  We compare the accuracy, convergence rate and computational cost of
eigenerosion (EE) and phase-field (PF) methods. For purposes of comparison, we
specifically consider the standard test case of a center-crack panel loaded in
biaxial tension and assess the convergence of the energy error as the length
scale parameter and mesh size tend to zero simultaneously. The panel is
discretized by means of a regular mesh consisting of standard bilinear or Q1
elements. The exact stresses from the known analytical linear elastic solution
are applied to the boundary. All element integrals over the interior and the
boundary of the domain are evaluated exactly using the symbolic computation
program Mathematica. When the EE inelastic energy is enhanced by means of
Richardson extrapolation, EE is found to converge at twice the rate of PF and
to exhibit much better accuracy. In addition, EE affords a
one-order-of-magnitude computational speed-up over PF.
