COMPLAS 2023

An advanced multi-phase field approach for coupled electro-chemo-mechanical problems using the preCICE library applied to fcc grain microstructure

  • Kandekar, Chaitanya (Helmut Schmidt University)
  • Ravikumar, Aravinth (Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon)
  • Höche, Daniel (Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon)
  • Weber, Wolfgang (Helmut Schmidt University)

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At the microstructural level, failure due to stress corrosion cracking (SCC) is often modelled with multiphysics components such as mechanical, chemical and electrochemical contributions. A coupled, computational challenging problem occurs. Thus, an approach was developed, implemented and applied to simulate crack respectively damage propagation in a fcc grain structure. The crack nucleation and propagation are strongly affected by crystal orientation, system properties at the grain boundaries, mechanical loading, as well as electrochemical system equations. This results in the competition between intergranular SCC (IGSCC) and transgranular SCC (TGSCC) and high sensitivity of failure occurrence to the convolution of interacting damage mechanisms. Therefore, for the investigation of structural failure by SCC, a comprehensive and detailed modelling technique is needed that tackles the consequences of various phenomena while taking scaling effects in time and space into account and retaining coupled mechanistic interaction. Simulating such a complex coupled processes limits computational capabilities. In this work, a multiphase- field computational approach is presented, which as an extension of a previous model [1] and recently published works [2, 3], to incorporate anisotropic effects for both elasto-plasticity and material dissolution along the preferential directions. Two separate software environments are used with dedicated solver settings and different time steps to simulate the fracture and dissolution-driven pitting corrosion stages considering the crystal anisotropy in the proposed computational setup. Subsequently, to exchange and interpolate the data, these solvers are coupled in predefined time step using the open-source coupling framework PreCICE [4]. Both IGSCC and TGSCC are simulated in an efficient manner. The proposed model is illustrated by several numerical examples that forecast the evolution of complicated fracture networks caused by stress corrosion cracking within a 2D polycrystalline model.