Domain decomposition methods and acceleration techniques for the phase field fracture staggered solver

Abstract

The phase field modeling of fracture is able to simulate the nucleation and the propagation of complex crack patterns. However, the relatively small internal lengths that are required usually lead to very fine meshes and high computational costs, especially for three-dimensional applications. In the present work, additional cost also comes from the implicit dynamics regularization of unstable crack propagations which potentially leads to a large variation of time steps when switching from quasi-static to dynamic regimes. To reduce the time to solution in this context, this study proposes a domain decomposition framework and acceleration techniques for the phase field fracture staggered solver. The displacement subproblem and the phase field one are solved with parallel domain decomposition solvers. Dual domain decomposition methods provide low cost preconditioner well adapted to the phase field subproblem. For displacement subproblems undergoing unstable crack propagations, primal domain decomposition methods are preferred to be less sensitive to the treatment of floating substructures. Preconditioners performances are assessed and scalability studies over academic test cases, up to 324 subdomains, are presented. Finally, the robustness of the approach is illustrated on two semi-industrial simulations.