Dante’s Inferno: A Guide to the 9 Circles of Fracture
Published:
Happy to share that our paper, “Nine circles of elastic brittle fracture: A series of challenge problems to assess fracture models,” is now published in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering (CMAME) and can be accessed here.
As the title suggests (inspired by Dante’s Inferno), this work introduces nine different challenges (each a circle of hell!) as a way to assess the viability of any computational approach to fracture (and not necessarily phase-field). These challenges span the complete range of fracture nucleation and propagation mechanisms.
What I value most about this work is the shift toward cumulative, reproducible science rather than ad‑hoc demos. Too often, new methods look good on a couple of picked benchmarks and quietly fail elsewhere. We propose a clear approach: meet the minimum across these challenges, and then the model is viable to pursue more.
Having faced this myself, I know how easy it is for a researcher to be interested in the topic yet lost among incomplete approaches. I hope this work helps identify the key challenges and pave a clearer path for the science.
The paper is also accompanied by a GitHub repository and a Data bank containing the data and mesh files to further facilitate the use of these challenges.