Liu, ZengLenarda, PietroReinoso Cuevas, José AntonioPaggi, Marco2025-03-122025-03-122025-01Liu, Z., Lenarda, P., Reinoso Cuevas, J.A. y Paggi, M. (2025). Phase field modeling of anisotropic silicon crystalline cracking in 3D thin-walled photovoltaic laminates. International Journal of Fracture, 249 (1), 19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10704-024-00821-3.0376-9429https://hdl.handle.net/11441/170079This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.A novel computational framework integrating the phase field approach with the solid shell formulation at finite deformation is proposed to model the anisotropic fracture of silicon solar cells in the thin-walled photovoltaic laminates. To alleviate the locking effects, both the enhanced assumed strain and assumed natural strain methods are incorporated in the solid shell element formulation. Aiming at tackling the poor convergence performance of standard Newton schemes, the efficient and robust quasi-Newton scheme is adopted for the solution of phase field modeling with enhanced shell formulation in a monolithic manner. Due to fracture anisotropy of the brittle silicon solar cells, the second-order structural tensor that is defined by the normal of preferential crack plane is introduced into the crack energy density function in the phase field modeling. On the other hand, to efficiently predict the crack growth of silicon solar cells, a global–local approach in the 3D setting proposed in the previous work is adopted here for the fracture modeling. In this approach, both mechanical deformation and phase field fracture are accounted for at the local model, while only mechanical deformation is addressed at the global level. At each time step, the solution of the global model is used to drive the local model, which corresponds to the one-way coupling in line with experimental evidence that the silicon cell cracking has negligible influence on the stiffness of photovoltaic modules. The capability of the modeling framework is demonstrated through numerical simulation of silicon solar cell cracking in the photovoltaic modules when subjected to different loading cases.application/pdf19 p.engAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Global–local approachPhase field fractureSolid shell elementQuasi–Newton schemeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccesshttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10704-024-00821-3