Darius Olesch

• The phase field approach is a powerful tool that can approximate different physical phenomena, including the presented fracture propagation. Even though a static discretization can be used for its computation, intense resources are required to achieve sufficient solutions. Therefore, a new element formulation with exponential functions is implemented to describe the steep curvatures of the fracture phase field crack surfaces more accurately. Unfortunately, an adaptive algorithm is necessary to circumvent their missing symmetry to approximate crack surfaces similarly. Additionally, the numerical integration for these special shape functions is investigated to improve the accuracy.