This tutorial explains the Abaqus damage model, a powerful method for simulating part failure using element deletion. Before diving into the setup in Abaqus, it gives you a quick understanding of how damage develops in materials and the basics of material behavior during failure.

Both Abaqus/Standard and Abaqus/Explicit can predict when failure begins, but Abaqus/Explicit also supports modeling how damage progresses in ductile materials. In real-world materials, damage happens due to the formation and growth of tiny cracks or voids, caused by loads like stretching, fatigue, high temperatures, or impact.

Damage mechanics focuses on how materials slowly lose their strength under these conditions. Abaqus models this by reducing the stiffness of the material as damage increases, and eventually deleting elements to represent complete failure. The software also allows multiple failure mechanisms to act at once, making the model more realistic.

In this short video (under 11 minutes), you’ll learn how to create a simple tensile test using damage criteria in Abaqus. The tutorial shows how to set up both stiffness degradation (to simulate weakening) and element deletion (to simulate breakage). It uses an explicit analysis without mass scaling to keep results accurate and easy to follow.