Local and non-local Gurson-based ductile damage and failure modelling at large deformation

The purpose of this work is the formulation, numerical implementation and initial application of a non-local extension of existing Gurson-based modelling for isotropic ductile damage and attendant crack growth. It is being carried out under the premise that void coalescence results not only in accelerated damage development (e.g., Needleman and Tvergaard, 1984), but also in damage delocalisation (i.e., via interaction between neighbouring Gurson RVEʹs). To this end, we proceed by analogy with the approach of Needleman and Tvergaard (1984) who replaced the Gurson void volume fraction f with a (local) effective damage parameter f∗ in the Gurson yield condition to account for the effect of void coalescence on the material behaviour. In the current case, the role of f∗ is taken over and generalised by an effective continuum damage field ν. A field relation for ν is formulated here in the framework of continuum thermodynamics. In the simplest case, the resulting relation is formally analogous to the inhomogeneous temperature equation in which void nucleation and growth represent (local) sources for ν and in which void coalescence takes place in a process zone whose dimension is determined by a characteristic material lengthscale. Analogous to temperature, then, ν represents an additional continuum degree-of-freedom here, resulting in a coupled deformation-damage field model. In the last part of the work, the complete model for coupled damage-deformation is implemented numerically using the finite-element method on the basis of backward-Euler integration and consistent linearisation. Using this implementation, the behaviour of the current extended Gurson-based damage model is investigated for the case of simple tension of an inhomogeneous steel block. In particular, the corresponding simulation results document quantitatively the dependence of the delocalisation of the model damage process and minimisation of mesh-dependence on the characteristic dimension of the damage process zone.