Phase-field modelling of fracture in single crystal plasticity

We propose a phase-field model for ductile fracture in a single crystal within the kinematically linear regime, by combining the theory of single crystal plasticity as formulated in Gurtin et al. [1] and the phase-field formulation for ductile fracture proposed by Ambati et al. [2]. The model introduces coupling between plasticity and fracture through the dependency of the socalled degradation function from a scalar global measure of the accumulated plastic strain on all slip systems. A viscous regularization is introduced both in the treatment of plasticity and in the phase-field evolution equation. Testing of the model on two examples for face centred cubic single crystals indicates that fracture is predicted to initiate and develop in the regions of the maximum accumulated plastic strain, which is in agreement with phenomenological observations. A rotation of the crystallographic unit cell is shown to affect the test results in terms of failure pattern and corresponding global and local response. Copyright © 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.