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R. Lackner, H.A. Mang:
"Simulation of Local Failure of Concrete Plates on the Basis of Error Control";
in: "Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Fracture Mechanics of Concrete and Concrete Structures (FraMCoS-3)", Aedificatio Publishers, Freiburg, 1998, 861 - 876.

This paper reports on the simulation of localized failure by means of the finite element method (FEM). The quality of results is controlled by estimating the error and adapting the mesh accordingly. An incremental error measure applicable to elastoplastic problems is employed. It forms the basis for adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). For the generation of the mesh, the advancing front technique is employed. This technique is extended to permit an alignment of the mesh, which may be important in case of localization. Attempting to preserve the objectivity of the FE results for this case, the fictitious crack concept is employed. Its influence on the adaptive calculation scheme including the restart of the computation at a certain load level, is discussed. The transfer of variables on the basis of the proposed calculation strategy is illustrated by means of two example problems. The impact of different prescribed error thresholds on the ultimate load is discussed in the third example.

Keywords: concrete, error estimation, adaptivity, adaptive FEM, localization, transfer of variables