Coupled damage-plasticity modelling of ductile failure in an aluminium alloy

摘要

The ductile failure of metallic alloys is characterized by the long plateau of the stressstrain response during plastic deformation. In aluminium alloys this complex process is principally mediated by crystal slip associated with dislocation nucleation, motion, interaction, and locking. This results in hardening, i.e. the increase in the flow stress and progressive exhaustion of ductility, eventually leading to damage. Therefore, in the advanced stages of deformation the strength increase at the material level competes with overall stiffness and strength decrease due to effective cross-section reduction by decohesion and voiding. Capturing the complex hierarchical failure of these materials requires developing sophisticated concurrent constitutive descriptions of both plastic deformation and damage at different stages of failure. In the present study the modelling of aluminium alloy failure is accomplished using a plasticity-based model with nonlinear hardening coupled with isotropic damage in a thermodynamically consistent framework. The model developed in this way is enhanced with nonlocal regularization to deal with material instabilities issues due to softening. Emphasis is placed on the correspondence between experimental measurements of the essential work of fracture and the non-essential work of fracture, and both local and spatial sets of model parameters. This approach is the key to assuring a constitutive response consistent with experimental observations, an issue usually overlooked in nonlocal constitutive modelling. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the features of the new approach.