A Finite Plasticity Gradient-Damage Model for Sheet Metals during Forming and Clinching

In recent years, clinching has gathered popularity to join sheets of different materials in industrial applications. The manufacturing process has some advantages, as reduced joining time, reduced costs, and the joints show good fatigue properties. To ensure the joint strength, reliable simulations of the material behaviour accounting for process-induced damage are expected to be beneficial to obtain credible values for the ultimate joint strength and its fatigue limit. A finite plasticity gradient-damage material model is outlined to describe the plastic and damage evolutions during the forming of sheet metals, later applied to clinching. The utilised gradient-enhancement cures the damage-induced localisation by introducing a global damage variable as an additional finite element field. Both, plasticity and damage are strongly coupled, but can, due to a dual-surface approach, evolve independently. The ability of the material model to predict damage in strongly deformed sheets, its flexibility and its regularization properties are illustrated by numerical examples.

Evolution of the stiffness tetrad in fiber-reinforced materials under large plastic strain

The main aim of this work is to track the evolution of the stiffness tetrad during large plastic strain. Therefore, the framework of a general finite plasticity theory is developed. Some special cases are examined, and the case of a material plasticity theory is considered more closely. Its main feature is that the elasticity law changes during plastic deformations, for which we develop an approach. As sample materials, we use three types of fiber-reinforced composites. For numerical experiments and verification of the model’s predictions, finite element simulations of representative volume elements for uni-, bi- and tri-directional reinforced materials with periodic boundary conditions are used. From these, we extract the stiffness tetrads before and after large deformations of the material. We quantify the change of the stiffness tetrads due to the fiber reorientation. Finally, we propose an analytical evolution with three parameters that account reasonably well for the evolution of the stiffness tetrad.

Quasistatic evolution for dislocation-free finite plasticity

We investigate quasistatic evolution in finite plasticity under the assumption that the plastic strain is compatible. This assumption is well-suited to describe the special case of dislocation-free plasticity and entails that the plastic strain is the gradient of a plastic deformation map. The total deformation can be then seen as the composition of a plastic and an elastic deformation. This opens the way to an existence theory for the quasistatic evolution problem featuring both Lagrangian and Eulerian variables. A remarkable trait of the result is that it does not require second-order gradients.

Existence for dislocation-free finite plasticity

This note addresses finite plasticity under the constraint that plastic deformations are compatible. In this case, the total elastoplastic deformation of the medium is decomposed as y = ye ○ yp, where the plastic deformation yp is defined on the fixed reference configuration and the elastic deformation ye is a mapping from the varying intermediate configuration yp(Ω). Correspondingly, the energy of the medium features both Lagrangian (plastic, loads) and not Lagrangian contributions (elastic). We present a variational formulation of the static elastoplastic problem in this setting and show that a solution is attained in a suitable class of admissible deformations. Possible extensions of the result, especially in the direction of quasistatic evolutions, are also discussed.