Refractory components are fundamental in the steel industry for the manipulation of liquid metal, but they have a very short life cycle and cannot easily be recycled, leading to a great waste of material. To sustain critical temperature conditions and high thermal gradients, refractories are made of ceramic materials whose mechanical behavior at service temperature can be brittle. To avoid unexpected brittle fractures these components are replaced after a fixed number of cycles or at the first appearance of a visible crack. Modeling and simulation can greatly enhance the design of these components to maximize material usage and working life avoiding early disposal. The goal of this work is to provide a new computational framework able to describe the complex behavior of refractories under working conditions, by combining constitutive modelling and fracture mechanics. This combination is made possible by the use of the phase field variational theory for fracture mechanics [1], which allows the analysis of damage in a solid as a scalar variable at each material point. A new constitutive model is proposed by combining the Bigoni-Piccolroaz yield criterion [2] with polynomial hardening functions based on the Bézier curves. The asymmetric tension-compression behavior of ceramic materials is described by an elastic energy split based on the failure criterion. The model is implemented on a Finite Element framework and validated using the experimental results of thermal shock experiments provided by the industrial partner. [1] Bourdin, Blaise, Gilles A. Francfort, and Jean-Jacques Marigo. “The Variational Approach to Fracture.” Journal of Elasticity 91, no. 1 (April 1, 2008): 5–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10659-007-9107-3. [2] Bigoni, Davide, and Andrea Piccolroaz. “Yield Criteria for Quasibrittle and Frictional Materials.” International Journal of Solids and Structures 41, no. 11–12 (June 2004): 2855–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2003.12.024.