20.1 Modeling fracture mechanics

You can study the onset of cracking in a quasi-static model by selecting regions from your model that will be used to compute contour integral estimates. During the analysis ABAQUS/Standard writes the values of the contour integrals to the output database as history output. For a detailed description of contour integrals, see Contour integral evaluation, Section 7.10.2 of the ABAQUS Analysis User's Manual. This section describes how you define a crack in ABAQUS/CAE. The following topics are covered: