On the Characterization of Strain-Hardening in Plasticity

In the context of a purely mechanical, rate-type theory of elastic-plastic materials and utilizing a strain space formulation introduced in [1], this paper is concerned mainly with developments pertaining to strain-hardening behavior consisting of three distinct types of material response, namely, hardening, softening, and perfectly plastic behavior. It is shown that such strain-hardening behavior may be characterized by a rate-independent quotient of quantities occurring in the loading criteria of strain space and the corresponding loading conditions of stress space. With the use of special constitutive equations, the predictive capability of the results obtained are illustrated for strain-hardening response and saturation hardening in a uniaxial tension test.