A Modified Damage-Plasticity Coupled Area-Weighted Nonlocal Model for Simulating Ductile Fracture and Softening Behaviors of Materials.

A nonlocal damage-plasticity coupled area-weighted model was proposed to investigate the fracture process of the ductile fracture materials with softening behavior, such as asphalt concrete materials. The model can overcome the mesh sensitivity problem in the analysis. A subroutine of ABAQUS software was developed to apply this nonlocal damage-plasticity coupled area-weighted model into finite element analysis. Then, the subroutine was adopted in finite element models to simulate several loading conditions. The results indicate that the nonlocal damage-plasticity coupled area-weighted model and the subroutine describe the softening behavior of asphalt concrete materials better than traditional softening models. And the robustness and stability of the proposed model were also justified. The proposed model provides a concrete and accurate alternate to predict the damage condition of asphalt concrete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]