  This article proposes an open-source implementation of a phase-field model
for brittle fracture using a recently developed finite element toolbox, Gridap
in Julia. The present work exploits the advantages of both the phase-field
model and Gridap toolbox for simulating fracture in brittle materials. On one
hand, the use of the phase-field model, which is a continuum approach and uses
a diffuse representation of sharp cracks, enables the proposed implementation
to overcome such well-known drawbacks of the discrete approach for predicting
complex crack paths as the need for re-meshing, enrichment of finite element
shape functions and an explicit tracking of the crack surfaces. On the other
hand, the use of Gridap makes the proposed implementation very compact and
user-friendly that requires low memory usage, and provides a high degree of
flexibility to the users in defining weak forms of partial differential
equations. A test on a notched beam under symmetric three-point bending and a
set of tests on a notched beam with three holes under asymmetric three-point
bending is considered to demonstrate how the proposed Gridap based phase-field
Julia code can be used to simulate fracture in brittle materials.
