Minisymposia：Gradient-damage and Nonlocal Methods of Fracture and Continuous to Discontinuous Transitions

Gradient-based and nonlocal models of fracture and failure have received considerable attention over the past decade.  These include gradient-damage methods, thick level-set methods, and phase-field methods for fracture.  All of these methods effectively regularize sharp cracks by distributing the damage over a length scale.  Such a continuous representation of fracture allows the methods to deal with complex challenges in fracture, such as crack nucleation, branching, and coalescence, particularly in three-dimensional settings.  While considerable progress has been made in these methods over the past several years, challenges remain.  This Minisymposium will gather researchers working on both gradient-damage and nonlocal methods to discuss common issues and strategies for dealing with numerical issues such as crack broadening and computational efficiency, as well as methodologies designed to transition from continuous fracture representations to true discontinuities.