PDFracture Analysis

Advanced fracture mechanics through a powerful but easy-to-use cloud-based workflow. Peridynamics naturally handles discontinuities — making it ideal for modelling crack initiation, growth, branching, and merging, all without remeshing or special crack-tracking techniques.

Traditional FEM struggles with discontinuities — element distortion, mesh dependence, special crack-tip enrichments. Peridynamics is formulated on bond integrals over a non-local horizon, so cracks emerge naturally from the physics without any extra machinery.

FIG.01 · peridynamic_fracture bond-based PD · cracks emerge from bond breakage · no remeshing

Six features that make peridynamic fracture practical for everyday engineering work.

Implicit peridynamic solver for quasi-static problems

An efficient implicit solver, purpose-built for fracture in solids:

• Implicit time integration for stable quasi-static loading
• Bond-based peridynamic formulation with critical stretch failure
• No special crack-tip enrichment, no XFEM bookkeeping
• Damage emerges from bond breakage — physically motivated

Incremental loading framework

Load is applied in steps, with crack propagation tracked between each:

• Step-by-step loading with adjustable increments
• Per-step damage evolution & crack-pattern updates
• Solver convergence monitoring at each step
• Captures both stable and unstable crack growth regimes

Flexible boundary conditions

Visual BC assignment on CAD surfaces and edges — no manual node selection:

• Displacement (prescribed, fixed, symmetry)
• Traction / pressure on surfaces
• Line loads on edges, lumped forces at vertices
• Automatic normal detection for traction direction

Predefined planar cracks

Seed cracks in the part to study propagation from a known starting point:

• Place planar cracks visually on the geometry
• Initial bond-breakage applied along the crack surface
• Multiple cracks per part, each with its own orientation
• Investigate branching, merging, and coalescence from initial defects

Direct CAD integration

The same CAD pipeline used across the SolidNetics stack:

• STL, STEP, IGES file support
• Automatic peridynamic point cloud generation from the geometry
• Adjustable point density for resolution control
• Multi-body parts & complex geometries

Powered by high-performance cloud computing

Bond-based PD is compute-heavy. SolidNetics scales it elastically:

• Multi-processing engine on high-core cloud workers
• Per-project & per-run resource scaling
• 3D post-processing — damage maps, displacement, stress, Von Mises
• Status dashboard with run progress & compute time

Full visualisation of damage evolution, crack patterns, and stress fields — in the browser, with no local GPU requirement.

FIG.02 · pd_fracture_postprocessing damage maps · crack patterns · displacement & stress fields

No installation. No licensing servers. No workstation needed. Peridynamic fracture solves run on SolidNetics cloud infrastructure.

Three steps from CAD upload to a full fracture simulation result.

Ideal for structural integrity assessment, damage evolution studies, brittle and quasi-brittle failure analysis — across aerospace, civil, energy, and academic engineering.