An anisotropic damage model for finite strains with full and reduced regularization of the damage tensor

Abstract The modeling of damage as an anisotropic phenomenon enables the consideration of arbitrarily oriented microcracks at the material point level. Yet, the incorporation of material softening into structural simulations still requires a regularization of for example, the degrading variable. There exist different possibilities for a regularization in case of anisotropic damage with varying numbers of nonlocal degrees of freedom corresponding to for example, the symmetric integrity tensor , the principal traces of the damage tensor or a scalar damage hardening variable. Here, we propose a finite strain formulation with a symmetric second order damage tensor of which all six independent components are regularized with a corresponding nonlocal degree of freedom. Due to the significant increase in computational cost caused by the full regularization of the damage tensor, alternative approaches for a reduced regularization with fewer nonlocal degrees of freedom are discussed. Thereafter, the results of a numerical example using the model with full regularization are presented.