NON-LOCAL DAMAGE PROCEDURE BASED ON WEIGHTED AVERAGING OF THE STRAIN FIELD

This paper deals with the behavior of brittle materials by way of an efficient non-local damage procedure. It is performed a weighted average of the strain field over a suitable neighborhood for assessing the strain field at a point avoiding mesh dependency. Initially, a summary about the non-local procedures and its implementation on a general finite element program and FEAP program is discussed. Two different ways to select the neighbor elements and three weight functions are presented. After, the equations for evaluating the strain average at a Gauss point considering the strain field over the neighborhood are shown. Finally, an example of a specimen under compression considering local damage and several non-local damage procedures is presented and discussed, even with the obtained processing time. The conclusions show the best alternatives to be adopted and make clear the utility of the procedure to evaluate the behavior of brittle material structures.