Hi Avtar, I am assuming that you are referring to spatial variations of the phase-field variable and that the fracture problem that you are solving is well posed (i.e. displacement controlled, thermal loads, work controlled). As we explained in our 2008 book, force driven problems are often ill posed. You may use an arc-length formulation, of minimize the fracture energy subject to prescribed work, and go back to a force-drive evolution (subject to a safe-load type of condition).
In a staggered scheme (alternate minimizations, block Gauss Seidel, adjoint-based quasi-Newton, call it whatever you like), the elasticity problem can become stiff, but remains really manageable. Feel free to try my implementation https://bitbucket.org/bourdin/mef90-sieve for comparison. Blaise On Jan 4, 2018, at 12:12 AM, Avtar Singh <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hello Petsc Users, I am solving a fortran framework to simulate phase-field fracture problem. Upto the failure point the code is working fine. But as the crack-phase starts to propagate, there is abrupt changes in the Stiffness Matrix, so determinant becomes nearly equal to zero. Hence, the code crashes. I tried with mumps package with pc lu. Also tried, superlu, gmres and fgmres with jacobi, bjacobi, lu. But the problem still persist. Can anyone suggest, Which solver and preconditioner should i use? Thank you -- Avtar Singh Research Scholar Multiscale Mechanics and Multiphysics Lab IIT Roorkee, Roorkee -- Department of Mathematics and Center for Computation & Technology Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA Tel. +1 (225) 578 1612, Fax +1 (225) 578 4276 http://www.math.lsu.edu/~bourdin
