“…The primary advantage of PFM lies in its capability of automatically predicting mesh-independent curvilinear crack patterns including branching and merging; this motivates its application to the simulation of complex intra-laminar composite failure mechanisms. The current applications of PFM include brittle fractures [38,39,40,41,42,43], quasibrittle fractures [44,45], ductile fractures [46,47,48,49], hydraulic fractures [50,51], and hydrogen assisted fractures [52]. PFM has also been implemented in the commercial software Abaqus [53,54,55,56] within user-element (UEL) and usermaterial (UMAT) subroutines.…”