The authors would like to point out three writing mistakes that have been found after the publication of the original paper: Equation (13) should be written as: 1 (Formula presented.) to correctly represent the intended column vector of the element's degrees of freedom. Equation (49) and (50) should be written as: 2 (Formula presented.) to keep the vector format consistent across the terms. The derivations afterwards are not affected by this change. Equation (63) should have no minus sign on the second term of the second row, that was a typographical error. The correct Equation (63) should be written as: 4 (Formula presented.) The above mistakes appear only in the writing of the manuscript, not in the actual implementation of the method. Hence, the results and conclusions in the original paper remain unchanged. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank Mr. Zhe Han from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics for pointing out some of the above mistakes.

Cohesive Element (CE) is a well-established finite element for fracture, widely used for the modelling of delamination in composites. However, the computational time of CE-based method is prohibitive. This is because the steep and non-smooth stress gradient in the cohesive zone requires a very fine mesh. In this context, a new type of CE is here proposed, aiming to loosen the mesh constraint and reduce the computational time. It uses a higher-order interpolation of the displacement field with rotational degree of freedom and an adaptive integration scheme based on the status of the element. The proposed CE has been validated through comparison with benchmark solutions of delamination in Mode I, Mode II and Mixed-Mode cases, and has demonstrated superior performance than standard CE in computational efficiency while retaining a high level of accuracy.

Cohesive element (CE) is a well-established finite element for fracture, widely used for the modeling of delamination in composites. However, an extremely fine mesh is usually needed to resolve the cohesive zone, making CE-based delamination analysis computationally prohibitive for applications beyond the scale of lab coupons. In this work, a new CE-based method of modeling delamination in composites is proposed to overcome this cohesive zone limit on the mesh density. The proposed method makes use of slender structural elements for the plies, a compatible formulation with adaptive higher-order integration for the CEs, and the corotational formulation for geometrically nonlinear analysis. The proposed method is verified and validated on the classical benchmark problems of Mode I, II, mixed-mode delamination, a buckling-induced delamination problem and a double-delamination problem. The results show that elements much larger than the cohesive zone length can be used while retaining accuracy.