  In this work, a recently developed fracture modeling method called localizing
gradient damage method (LGDM) is implemented in MATLAB. MATLAB is well-known in
the computational research community for its simple and easy-to-learn coding
interface. As a result, MATLAB is generally preferred for the initial
development (prototyping) of computational models by researchers. However,
MATLAB-developed codes are seldom used for large-scale simulations (after
initial development is complete) due to their computational inefficiency.
Hence, a computationally efficient implementation of LGDM using MATLAB
vectorization is presented in this work. The choice of LGDM (as the fracture
modeling method) is based on its thermodynamically consistent formulation built
upon the micromorphic framework. Moreover, the non-linear coupled field
formulation of LGDM makes it suitable for testing the computational efficiency
of vectorized MATLAB implementation in a non-linear finite element setting. It
is shown in this work that the vectorized MATLAB implementation can save
significant computational resources and time as compared to non-vectorized
implementations (that are parallelized with MATLAB parfor). The vectorized
MATLAB implementation is tested by solving numerical problems in 1D, 2D and 3D
on a consumer-grade PC, demonstrating the capability of vectorized
implementation to run simulations efficiently on systems with limited
resources. The sample source codes are provided as supplementary materials that
would be helpful to researchers working on similar coupled field models.
