Numerical simulation of adiabatic shear bands and crack propagation in thermoviscoplastic materials

Plane strain deformations of an elastoplastic material are studied using numerical methods. In the first chapter, a meshless formulation of the static small strain elastic-plastic problem is formulated using the meshless local Petrov-Galerkin method. The code is validated against the small strain plasticity routines in the commercial finite element code ABAQUS for two basic configurations with loading, unloading, and reloading. The results are found to agree within 5%. The validated code is then used to analyze the stress intensity factor (SIF) in a double edge-cracked plate. Deformations of the plate are studied both with and without exploiting the symmetry conditions. The penalty method is used to enforce the essential boundary condition in the former case. When analyzing the deformations of the entire plate, the diffraction method is employed in order to introduce the discontinuity in the displacement field across the crack faces. The log-log and a higher order extrapolation technique due to Dally and Berger (1996) are used to calculate the SIF. It is found that the penalty method was inadequate to enforce the essential boundary conditions in the vicinity of the crack tip and that in this region the deformations were oscillatory. Consequently, the SIF calculation using the higher order technique was not accurate. It is also found that for a small plastic zone (3% of the cracked length) the SIFs do not differ significantly from their values for the corresponding linear elastic problem.; In the second chapter, a finite element formulation of the dynamic deformations of a microporous thermoviscoplastic solid is formulated. The heat conduction in a material is assumed to be governed by a hyperbolic heat equation; thus thermal and mechanical waves propagate with finite speeds. The formation and propagation of an adiabatic shear band (ASB) in plane strain tensile deformations is studied for eleven materials. A parametric study of the effect of the initial defect strength where the defect is assumed through an initially inhomogeneous distribution of porosity, the thermal conductivity, the thermal wave speed, and the applied strain-rate upon the ASB initiation and propagation is conducted. It is found that the susceptibility ranking for this configuration differs somewhat from that previously found for simple shear and torsion of thin-walled tubes.; In the final chapter, the formulation from the previous chapter is modified to permit the formation and propagation of brittle and ductile fracture. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...