Generate cohesive elements for Abaqus

[CsatiZoltan]

Motivation

By allowing the degradation along the interfaces, one can better capture the localization, which is often intergranular in polycrystalline materials. The cohesive zone model is simple to implement for non-moving interfaces, once we have access to the 1D elements on the interfaces.

Useful links

Cohesive zone modelling in Abaqus

Here come the links I bookmarked...

Workflow

The following tasks need to be done:

• Fork Phon and make it work with Python 3.
  • Issue with non-mutable OrderedDict: create cohesive element from .msh format KristofferC/Phon#9 (comment)
  • Use list(dictionary) instead of dictionary.keys() to loop through and modify dictionary.
  • Support 2D nodes (maybe it's only needed during the .inp file writing)
  • Support CPS3 element types for Abaqus.
• Prepare the med module to be able to extract edges and edge groups from a .med file.
• Create a function/class in the simulation module (not in the geometry module to keep it uncoupled) that will manage the whole cohesive zone insertion.
  • Create a wrapper class for Phon in simulation (if it proves to be a general solution, I can still refactor it later). Going through and understand everything in Phon would take too much time to worth it for now. Rather create a function/class that wraps it. That wrapper should contain a converter to create Mesh object, then to call the create_cohesive_elements function, and finally convert it back to my format. I should not use Phon's capability to write to an input file because it deletes important information, such as material definitions. Some links to start with:
    • https://phon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/insert_interface.html
    • https://phon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/phon.mesh_objects.html#module-phon.mesh_objects.mesh
• Document the workflow by
  • creating an example in a Jupyter notebook
  • write about the extraction of the 1D interface mesh in https://cristalx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/salome.html

[CsatiZoltan]

Phon and other alternatives, such as ciGen and DEIP, did not work. I will have to implement it by myself.