  Slender beams are often employed as constituents in engineering materials and
structures. Prior experiments on lattices of slender beams have highlighted
their complex failure response, where the interplay between buckling and
fracture plays a critical role. In this paper, we introduce a novel
computational approach for modeling fracture in slender beams subjected to
large deformations. We adopt a state-of-the-art geometrically exact Kirchhoff
beam formulation to describe the finite deformations of beams in
three-dimensions. We develop a discontinuous Galerkin finite element
discretization of the beam governing equations, incorporating discontinuities
in the position and tangent degrees of freedom at the inter-element boundaries
of the finite elements. Before fracture initiation, we enforce compatibility of
nodal positions and tangents weakly, via the exchange of
variationally-consistent forces and moments at the interfaces between adjacent
elements. At the onset of fracture, these forces and moments transition to
cohesive laws modeling interface failure. We conduct a series of numerical
tests to verify our computational framework against a set of benchmarks and we
demonstrate its ability to capture the tensile and bending fracture modes in
beams exhibiting large deformations. Finally, we present the validation of our
framework against fracture experiments of dry spaghetti rods subjected to
sudden relaxation of curvature.
