Micromechanical concept for the analysis of damage evolution in thermo-viscoelastic and quasi-brittle materials

The aim of this paper is to develop a thermodynamically consistent micromechanical concept for the damage analysis of viscoelastic and quasi-brittle materials. As kinematical damage variables a set of scalar-, vector-, and tensor-valued functions is chosen to describe isotropic and anisotropic damage. Since the process of material degradation is governed by physical mechanisms on levels with different length scale, the macro- and mesolevel, where on the mesolevel microdefects evolve due to microforces, we formulate in this paper the dynamical balance laws for macro- and microforces and the first and second law of thermodynamics for macroand mesolevel. Assuming a general form of the constitutive equations for thermo-viscoelastic and quasi-brittle materials, it is shown that according to the restrictions imposed by the Clausius–Duhem inequality macro- and microforces consist of two parts, a non-dissipative and a dissipative part, where on the mesolevel the latter can be regarded as driving forces on moving microdefects. It is shown that the non-dissipative forces can be derived from a free energy potential and the dissipative forces from a dissipation pseudo-potential, if its existence can be assured. The micromechanical damage theory presented in this paper can be considered as a framework which enables the formulation of various weakly nonlocal and gradient, respectively, damage models. This is outlined in detail for isotropic and anisotropic damage.