A spatially adaptive phase-field model of fracture

Phase-field models of fracture introduce smeared cracks of width commensurate with a regularisation length parameter ε and obeying a minimum energy principle. Mesh adaptivity naturally suggests itself as a means of supplying spatial resolution where needed while simultaneously keeping the computational size of the model as small as possible. Here, a variational-based spatial adaptivity is proposed for a phase-field model of fracture.