COUPLED 2023

An advanced Coupling Approach for Solving Corrosion and Fracture Mechanics using preCICE

  • Kandekar, Chaitanya (Helmut Schmidt University)
  • Ravikumar, Aravinth (Helmholtz-Zentrum hereon GmbH)
  • Höche, Daniel (Helmholtz-Zentrum hereon GmbH)
  • Weber, Wolfgang (Helmut Schmidt University)

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Stress corrosion cracking (SCC) failure is a multi-physics phenomena and is usually modelled at the microstructural level, which includes mechanical, chemical, and electrical contributions. Aggressive corrosive environment, pit formation due to metal dissolution, pit-to-crack transition, properties at grain boundaries, mechanical loading, metal plasticity, and crystal anisotropy are all aspects that significantly impact the initiation and progress of SCC. Since corrosion is a slow process whereas brittle fracture is a rapid failure mechanism, the individual domain discretization-based solvers need to use distinct time steps and appropriate solver settings. In order to address the issues that arise while accounting for scaling effects in time and space and retaining coupled mechanistic interplay and including the aspects specified earlier, a sophisticated modelling method is necessary for the analysis of structural failure by SCC. In this work, a partitioned multi-physics computational approach is presented, using two separate single physics solvers coupled by an open-source coupling library, preCICE [1]. The model includes the anisotropic effects of the aluminium alloy crystals and serves as an extension to the previous work [2]. In the proposed computational setup, two separate software environments are used with dedicated solver settings and different time steps to simulate the mechanical fracture and dissolution-driven pitting corrosion, under various loading and corrosion conditions. Several numerical examples that predict the evolution of fracture and crack path brought on by stress corrosion cracking in a 2D polycrystalline model of a specific aluminium alloy are used to illustrate and evaluate the proposed model. References: [1] Gerasimos Chourdakis, Kyle Davis, Benjamin Rodenberg, Miriam Schulte, Frederic Simonis, Benjamin Uekermann et al.: preCICE v2: A sustainable and user-friendly coupling library. Open Research Europe, vol. 2, no. 51, 2022. [2] Kandekar, C., Ravikumar, A., H ̈oche, D. & Weber, W. E.: A partitioned computational framework for damage evolution in stress corrosion cracking utilizing phase-field. Proceedings in Applied Mathematics & Mechanics, doi: 10.1002/pamm.202200211, to appear.