PSI - Issue 79

Domenico Ammendolea et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 79 (2026) 467–474

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velocity climbs again, eventually reaching the prescribed critical branching speed of 0.6 c R (1271 m/s) at 30.5 µ s. The predicted crack-branching time shows remarkable agreement with the results obtained with PF-CZM (Nguyen and Wu (2018)) and FEM-CZM (Hirmand and Papoulia (2019)). This strong concordance in velocity history, both before and after branching, suggests that the calibrated parameters for dynamic crack growth toughness are highly representative of the material's actual behavior. Regarding the final crack paths (illustrated in Figure 5), the proposed approach shows strong overall agreement with the predictions from PF-CZM and FEM-CZM. Minor discrepancies in the final trajectory, however, are directly attributed to subtle variations in the computed crack-tip velocity histories among the models, as the crack-propagation angle is inherently dependent on these histories. The comparison highlights that the velocity history is the primary factor influencing the final deflected crack trajectory. Notably, the path predicted by the Peridynamics model differed considerably, a variance primarily explained by its prediction of a significantly delayed branching time.

Figure 3. Case study: (a) Geometry and loading conditions; (b) Computational mesh.

Figure 4. Case study: Time history of the crack propagation velocity.