Simulation of dynamic fracture processes in polycrystalline silicon microsystems by means of a multi-step, domain decomposition method

A domain decomposition technique is extended to the case of a dynamic crack propagation in a heterogeneous material. The fracture is described through a cohesive approach in a standard, displacement-based finite element method. To comply with the large scale computing requirements for three-dimensional problems and the stability condition for time integration, the domain decomposition is coupled with multi time step algorithms. The theoretical framework is here discussed and tested with numerical samples made in the polycrystalline silicon material typically adopted in the microsystem industry