A novel damage assessment method in Peridynamic simulations

This paper proposes a novel approach to evaluate the damage in Peridynamic simulations to identify the crack initiation and propagation, based on the physical meaning of the bond network. The most commonly used criterion to assess the damage in Peridynamic simulations is the nodal damage value, a ratio of the broken bonds to number of unbroken bonds for each point. There is no consensus on the magnitude of nodal damage value within the literature. In most cases, the assessment is conducted visually via damage contours. Rarely, researchers calculate nodal damage value by counting the bonds that pass through a crack plane and must be broken to initiate a crack. Despite being widely-used, the application of nodal damage value is questionable since it neglects the likelihood of broken bonds that are irrelevant to a crack. In other words, the applied value of the nodal damage value might not give the information about the crack whether it emerges or not. This paper shows the influence of the nodal damage value on damage assessments and compares the proposed method with the nodal damage value in different scenarios. The results exhibit that the proposed method is robust, effective, and more importantly provides a single outcome for Peridynamic simulations.