Adaptive mesh refinement and cycle jumps for phase-field fatigue fracture modeling

A phase-field approach was used in order to model the complex mechanisms of fatigue crack nucleation and growth. This popular method enables a flexible framework that recovers accurately expected crack patterns. However, it usually suffers from several efficiency drawbacks, such as the need for a very fine mesh, and the heavy computational cost associated with the cycle by cycle approach. For this reason, we put forward the coupling of adaptive mesh refinement and cycle jumps, to significantly accelerate computing time, at a given level of accuracy. Several numerical examples were studied to showcase the abilities of the proposed coupling and some qualitative numerical/experimental comparisons were made. In the end, the proposed coupling was able to recover non accelerated results with significant computing gains.