Fangrui Liu, M. Sc.

Material damage leads to a local increase in temperature due to energy dissipation. In turn, a non-uniform temperature distribution can result in damage evolution due to the internal stress in the physical body. We at IKM make use of the extended Hamilton’s principle to create a new thermo-mechanically coupling gradient-enhanced damage model which describes the evolution of damage and temperature. In order to accelerate the computation speed, we adopt the Neighboured Element Method (NEM) to calculate the Laplace operator of the damage variable and the temperature in the governing equations. The simulation of damage in ceramic plate when cooling down in cold water shows the robustness of our method in the thermal shock problem; the fact that we only need less than 10% of the computation time for a 2D reference problem for our 3D simulation demonstrates the numerical efficiency.