Mesh coarsening using the phantom-node method in the phase field model

Abstract

The phantom-node method is applied in the phase field model for mesh coarsening to improve computational efficiency. When the adaptive mesh refinement scheme is used, the fine mesh still remains along the path where crack already passed. However, structural properties such as stiffness, damage and strain energy of an element completely partitioned by the crack path remain almost unchanged during the rest of the simulation. Using the phantom-node method, the fine mesh in the crack path domain is recovered into a coarse mesh. This numerical scheme significantly reduces the number of degrees of freedom involved in the computation. Using the mesh coarsening method together with the adaptive mesh refinement and adaptive update schemes, the computational cost is further reduced. Through several numerical examples, the performance of the proposed method is demonstrated.