Phase field study of the effective fracture energy increase during dynamic crack propagation in disordered heterogeneous materials

The propagation of a 3D crack in an heterogeneous material is studied using a phase field model. It is shown that in the case of randomly distributed inclusions of soft material in a matrix, the nature of the distribution has little effect on the effective elastic properties. On the opposite it affects significantly crack propagation. The less uniform distribution leads to higher thresholds for crack propagation.