Relaxed incremental formulations for damage at finite strains including strain softening

Relaxation is a promosing technique to overcome mesh-dependency in computational damage mechanics originating from the non-convexity of an underlying incremental variational formulation. This technique does not require an internal length scale parameter. However, in case of damage formulations, for many years the decrease of stresses with an increase of strains, referred to as strain-softening, could not be modeled in the relaxed regime. This contribution discusses several possibilities of relaxation that lead to suitable models for stress- and strain-softening