The cohesive element approach to dynamic fragmentation: the question of energy convergence

The cohesive element approach is getting increasingly popular for simulations in which a large amount of cracking occurs. Naturally, a robust representation of fragmentation mechanics is contingent to an accurate description of dissipative mechanisms in form of cracking and branching. A number of cohesive law models have been proposed over the years and these can be divided into two categories: cohesive laws that are initially rigid and cohesive laws that have an initial elastic slope. This paper focuses on the initially rigid cohesive law, which is shown to successfully capture crack branching mechanisms in simulations. The paper addresses the issue of energy convergence of the finite-element solution for high-loading rate fragmentation problems, within the context of small strain linear elasticity. These results are obtained in an idealized one-dimensional setting, and they provide new insight for determining proper cohesive zone spacing as function of loading rate. The findings provide a useful roadmap for choosing mesh sizes and mesh size distributions in two and three-dimensional fragmentation problems. Remarkably, introducing a slight degree of mesh randomness is shown to improve by up to two orders of magnitude the convergence of the fragmentation problem. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.