With the improvement of computer power and technology, fracture modelling by finite element methods has become a topic of extensive studies. However, fracture simulation much limited to an academic study of crack propagation with a fine mesh. Element deletion method is a useful tool for estimating damage due to accidental or extreme loads on structures, provided that an effective and realistic criterion is established for simulating the material failure and subsequent element deletion. In this study, ABAQUS/Explicit is used to simulate the material failure on the basis of experimental results by X. Huang et al. Through numerical experiments, we suggest a formulation to determine the failure strain associated with the size and thickness of removed elements.