Abstract
This paper discusses 2D models of beams for simulating the fracture of brittle materials. A simulation of an experiment on a concrete beam subjected to bending, in which two overlapping cracks occur, is used to study the effect of individual beam characteristics and different arrangements of the beams in the overall network mesh. It was found that any regular orientation of the beams influences the resulting crack patterns. Methods to implement a wide range of poisson's ratios are also developed, the use of the mesh to study arbitrary micro-structures is outlined. The crack pattern that are obtained with mesh are in good agreement with the experimental results. Also, numerical simulations of the tests were performed by means of a model, and non-integer dimensions were measured on the predicted mesh damage patterns.