A novel phase‐field approach to brittle damage mechanics of gradient metamaterials combining action formalism and history variable

Metamaterials response is generally modeled by generalized continuum based theories. Their inherent substructure leads to a necessity for higher-order theories, and especially in damage mechanics, such a generalization is difficult to acquire. We exploit the action formalism in order to obtain the governing equations in generalized damage mechanics for metamaterials. Additionally, by using auxilliary variables, the variational formulation is endowed with the first rate of damage variable that is missing in standard approaches. The presented action formalism with auxilliary variables leads directly to the weak form. We implement a finite element method based approach by using open-source computing platform called FEniCS and solve this weak in order to obtain the deformation and damage numerically. Metamaterials simulations are demonstrated for simple geometries in mixed mode (I and II) as well as in mode III.