Experimental and numerical characterization of damage evolution in steels

This paper presents an experimental and numerical characterization of ductile damage evolution in steels subjected to large plastic deformations. To this end, a set of tensile tests combining load–unload tensile cycles is firstly carried out in order to evaluate the deterioration exhibited by the Young’s modulus for increasing levels of plastic deformation. This task allows, in turn, to derive the characteristic parameters involved in a well-established evolution equation for the isotropic damage variable. In this context, a new damage identification procedure is presented. Different aspects of it are particularly addressed. The obtained material parameters are the basic data to be considered in the simulations that are performed afterwards: the analysis of the tensile test mainly aimed at assessing the proposed characterization and, in addition, the modelling of the flattening process of a cylinder studied to discuss the performance of the constitutive model in the prediction of damage evolution.