Professor John T. Foster

Peridynamic modeling of ductile and quasi-brittle fracture

George H. Fancher Fellow and Associate Professor in the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, USA

John T. Foster is an associate professor in The Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, The Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, and a core faculty member at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. Before joining UT-Austin, I was previously a faculty member in mechanical engineering at UTSA and was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories where he worked for 7 years. He received a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from Texas Tech University and PhD from Purdue University. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Texas. He is the co-founder and CTO of Daytum, a tech-enabled professional education company focusing on teaching data science and machine learning to working engineers. During his career in research has been involved in many projects ranging from full scale projectile penetration field tests, to laboratory experiments using Kolsky bars, to modeling and simulation efforts using some of the world’s largest computers. His research interests are in computational mechanics, multi-scale modeling, and scientific machine learning with applications to geomechanics, impact mechanics, fracture mechanics, and anomalous transport processes.

Abstract

Peridynamic modeling of ductile and quasi-brittle fracture

Predictive fracture propagation remains a challenge in computational mechanics. Research in recent decades has brought promising advances with cohesive zone methods, generalized finite element methods (e.g. XFEM), phase-field methods, and peridynamics. Peridynamics is a nonlocal continuum theory that has demonstrated good accuracy in simulating brittle fracture and fragmentation in complex three-dimensional simulations. However, attempts at using peridynamics for ductile fracture have been less successful, as demonstrated in the Sandia Fracture Challenges, and more recently there has been a series of talks and papers critical of peridynamics for quasi-brittle fracture applications. In this talk, I will discuss a constitutive modeling framework and specialized discretization techniques for peridynamics that lead to stable and accurate simulations of ductile and quasi-brittle fracture. I will present overwhelming evidence via simulation results compared to complex experiments that demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed framework. I will also discuss the role of calibration vs. “prediction” with respect to computational fracture simulations.

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