Anisotropic mesh adaptation for crack propagation induced by a thermal shock in 2D

In this paper we focus on the thermo-mechanical model proposed in Bourdin et al. (2014) and Marigo et al. (2013) which describes crack genesis and propagation in brittle materials induced by a thermal shock. Our goal is to provide an efficient numerical technique which employs a computational finite element mesh finely customized to the problem at hand to simulate such phenomena in a 2D setting. In particular, we generate automatically adapted anisotropic grids able to closely follow the narrow bands of the damage, driven by a theoretically sound mathematical tool. We carry out three numerical tests to assess the computational performance of the proposed method.