A dimension-reduction model for brittle fractures on thin shells with mesh adaptivity

In this paper, we derive a new 2D brittle fracture model for thin shells via dimension reduction, where the admissible displacements are only normal to the shell surface. The main steps include to endow the shell with a small thickness, to express the three-dimensional energy in terms of the variational model of brittle fracture in linear elasticity, and to study the Γ-limit of the functional as the thickness tends to zero. The numerical discretization is tackled by first approximating the fracture through a phase field, following an Ambrosio–Tortorelli like approach, and then resorting to an alternating minimization procedure, where the irreversibility of the crack propagation is rigorously imposed via an inequality constraint. The minimization is enriched with an anisotropic mesh adaptation driven by an a posteriori error estimator, which allows us to sharply track the whole crack path by optimizing the shape, the size, and the orientation of the mesh elements. Finally, the overall algorithm is successfully assessed on two Riemannian settings and proves not to bias the crack propagation.