The plastic potential in the theory of anisotropic elastic-plastic solids

Abstract

In the paper the yield condition is proposed for the most general anisotropic material. It is one of the possible generalizations of the Huber-Mises-Hencky yield condition for the case of anisotropy. The body considered is anisotropic elastically as well as plastically. It is assumed that the plastic anisotropy tensor is a definite function of the elastic anisotropy tensor. The corresponding flow function is a part of the strain energy and its value remains unchanged when all normal components of stress are increased by the same value. The theory of the eigen states for fourth order tensors is used. The plastic anisotropy tensor proposed has the same deviatoric eigen states as the elastic anisotropy tensor. The proposed yield condition reduces to that of Huber-Mises-Hencky when the anisotropy is vanishingly small. The method presented in this paper can be also applied to describe other types of plastic anisotropy tensor.