Truncated Nonsmooth Newton Multigrid for phase-field brittle-fracture problems

We propose the Truncated Nonsmooth Newton Multigrid Method (TNNMG) as a solver for the spatial problems of the small-strain brittle-fracture phase-field equations. TNNMG is a nonsmooth multigrid method that can solve biconvex, block-separably nonsmooth minimization problems in roughly the time of solving one linear system of equations. It exploits the variational structure inherent in the problem, and handles the pointwise irreversibility constraint on the damage variable directly, without penalization or the introduction of a local history field. Memory consumption is significantly lower compared to approaches based on direct solvers. In the paper we introduce the method and show how it can be applied to several established models of phase-field brittle fracture. We then prove convergence of the solver to a solution of the nonsmooth Euler-Lagrange equations of the spatial problem for any load and initial iterate. Numerical comparisons to an operator-splitting algorithm show a speed increase of more than one order of magnitude, without loss of robustness.