A phenomenological approach to fatigue with a variational phase-field model: The one-dimensional case
We propose a new variational fatigue phase-field model. The basic idea of the model is to let the fracture energy decrease as a suitably defined accumulated strain measure increases, which is obtained by introducing a dissipation potential which explicitly depends on the strain history. This amounts to a phenomenological description of a multitude of microscopic material degradation mechanisms, that are responsible for the macroscopic evidence of fatigue effects.