The coupling of plasticity with a relaxation‐based approach to damage modeling

Abstract

AbstractSince damage occurs in context of high stresses that are also related to the development of plastic strains, it is natural to couple damage and plasticity phenomena to achieve a more realistic model. Hereto, the new damage model presented in [2] was used and enhanced with plasticity and isotropic hardening, as first shown in [1]. Thereby, the damage model is based on a new regularization approach and provides mesh‐independent results. In order to achieve mesh‐independence, damage models usually take into account the non‐local behavior by using a field function that couples the local damage parameter to a non‐local level, in which differences between the local and non‐local parameter as well as the gradient of the non‐local parameter can be penalized [3]. In contrast, the new regularization approach no longer needs a non‐local level at the finite element scale but directly provides mesh‐independent results. Due to the new variational approach, we are also able to improve the calculation times and convergence behavior. Furthermore, the enhancement with plasticity and isotropic hardening allows to investigate the influences between damage and plastic strains to each other as well as the resulting influences to the cracks. (© 2017 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)