Material failure analysis is critical to industry and society as it can guide the development of better products and optimized engineering processes and provide answers as to why failures occurred. This concerns a broad range of disciplines ranging from mechanical and civil engineering to geoengineering and biomechanics. In a computational context, the choice of an appropriate model depends on several factors as more than one approach can be used to describe the same physics. Central to any model, however, is the understanding of the processes that drive failure. This particularly holds for coupled multi-physics (thermo-, hydro-, chemo-mechanical) actions resulting in material degradation and failure.
Thanks to software and hardware development, failure processes in heterogeneous and composite materials can nowadays be described across several length scales, from the atomic to the continuum scale. Although much progress has been made, in some cases the computational complexity is still exceptionally high and the physical processes behind failure are not adequately represented.
The aim of this mini-symposium is to discuss and exchange ideas on new developments, applications, advantages and disadvantages of advanced strategies for computational material failure in a static and dynamic setting. Topics include multi-scale and computational homogenization methods, multi-physics failure models, regularized continuum, peridynamics and displacement discontinuity-based models, reduced-order models as well as approaches for the continuous-to-discontinuous description of failure.