The work presents a gradient-extended ansisotropic damage model for brittle materials utilizing a second order damage tensor. In order to take into account tension compression asymmetry (TCA), the strain tensor is split into a tension and a compression related part by means of a spectral decomposition. The formulation is based on a global incremental potential allowing for large time/load steps. The gradient extension is accomplished using the micromorphic approach. Although using a damage tensor of second order, only one scalar additional degree of freedom (micromorphic variable) is introduced. First, the effects of TCA are illustrated with a simple uniaxial loading case at integration point level. Afterwards, the effect of the additionally introduced artificial viscosity, used in order to circumvent snapback situations, is shown for a structural example (without TCA). Finally, a structural example considering TCA is presented for which spurious failure in compression can be avoided.The presented anisotropic damage model, recently developed by the authors (see [1] and [2]), utilizes two internal variables ν = {D, α}, where D represents a symmetric second order damage tensor and α a scalar damage hardening variable. Using the micromorphic approach according to [3], in addition to the displacement field u, the scalar variable α χ (micromorphic counterpart to α) is introduced as global degree of freedom, based on which the gradient extension of the model is accomplished. A global incremental potential approach is pursued which allows for large time/load steps (see [4] for a comparison with a standard implementation). Starting point is the time-discrete form of the global incremental potential given byHere, the time-discrete form of the local incremental potential π is given by (for details, see [5, 6]):where the specific expression for the dissipation potential φ can be found in [1]. Following the work of [3], the Helmholtz free energy has a standard local contribution and a micromorphic contribution (in order to accomplish the gradient extension):The micromorphic energy is given by ψ micr = 1 2 µl 2 ∇α χ 2 + 1 2 H χ (α χ − α) 2 . The first part accounts for the gradient of the additionally introduced micromorphic field variable α χ , with l representing the internal length. The second term acts as penalty term and penalizes the difference between the 'local' α and its micromorphic counterpart α χ by means of the penalty parameter H χ . The local part includes the elastic strain energy and damage hardening. Based on the spectral decomposition of the strain tensor the following form for ψ e is used in order account for tension compression asymmetry (cf.The parameters λ and µ represent the Lamé-constants, ϑ controls the damage anisotropy of the µ-term and h tc is the TCA parameter (h tc = 1: no TCA, h tc = 0: full TCA). The function g(D) damages the λ-term in an isotropic manner, for possible expressions see [1]. Furthermore, the following definitions are used: tr + (ε) = tr(ε) , tr − (ε) = − −tr(ε) , and