Gradient enhanced damage for quasi-brittle materials

Conventional continuum damage descriptions of material degeneration suffer fromloss of well-posedness beyond a certain level of accumulated damage. As aconsequence, numerical solutions are obtained which are unacceptable from aphysical point of view. The introduction of higher-order deformationgradients in the constitutive model is demonstrated to be an adequate remedyto this deficiency of standard damage models. A consistent numericalsolution procedure of the governing partial differential equations ispresented, which is shown to be capable of properly simulating localizationphenomena.