T. Belytschko & B.

Moran, Solution Methods, December 16, 1998

Experimentally that metal plasticity depends on scale and developed a gradient plasticity theory motivated by dislocation movement regularization Techniques. There are thus four regularization techniques that are under study for unstable materials: 1. Gradient regularization, in which a gradient of a field variable is introduced in the constitutive equation

2. Integral, or nonlocal, regularization, in which the constitutive equation is a function of a nonlocal variable, such as nonlocal damage, a nonlocal invariant of a strain, or a nonlocal strain. 3. Coupled stress regularization 4. Regularization by introducing time dependence into the material. All of these are except the last are still in an embryonic state of development. Little is known about the material constants and the associated material length scales which are required. Regularization by introducing time dependence has progressed faster than the others because viscoplastic material laws has achieved a stat e of maturity by the time that localization became a hot area of research. However, viscoplastic regularization has some notable peculiarities: there is no constant length scale in the viscoplastic model and the solution in the presence of material instability is characterized by exponential growth. Therefore, although a discontinuity does not develop in the displacement as in the rate-independent strainsoftening material, the gradient in the displacement increases unboundedly with time. Wright and Walter have shown that this anomaly can be rectified by coupling the momentum equation to heat conduction via the energy conservation equation. The length scales then computed agrees well with observed shear band widths in metals. The computational modeling of localization still poses substantial difficulties. For most materials, the length scales of shear bands are much smaller than those of the body. Therefore tremendous resolution is required to obtain a reasonably accurate solution to these problems, see Belytschko et al for some high resolution computations. Solutions converge very slowly with mesh refinement. This behavior of numerical solutions is often called mesh sensitivity or lack of objectivity, though it has nothing to do with objectivity or its absence: it is simply a consequence of the inability of coarse meshes to resolves high gradient in viscoplastic materials or discontinuities in rate-independent solutions. Several techniques have evolved to improve the coarse-mesh accuracy of finite element models for unstable materials. The first of these involve the embedment of discontinuities in the element. Ortiz ewt al were the first to do this: they embedded discontinuities in the strain field of the 4-node quadrilateral when the acoustic trensor indicated a material instability in the element. Belytschko, Fish and Engleman attempted to embed a displacement discontinuity by enriching the strain field with a narrow band where the unstable material behavior occurs. In the band, the material behavior was considered homogeneous, which is ridiculous since an unstable material cannot remain in a homogenous state of stress: any perturbation will trigger a growth on the scale of the perturbation. Such is hindsight. Nevertheless these models were able to capture the evolving discontinuity in displacement more effectively. Sime and ??? invoked the theory of distributions to justify such techniques. They also categorized discontinuities as strong (in the displacements) and weak (in the strains). This categorization 675