Uniaxial ratchetting in rate-independent plasticity laws (Q1367295)

The authors analyze uniaxial ratchetting in the context of rate-independent plasticity laws. The analysis is referred to constitutive models with kinematic hardening, as well as to sawtooth input functions for stress with constant absolute value of the stress rate. For such loading histories, the authors derive some analytical formulas and explicit expressions concerning the model response to a sufficiently large number of cycles. It turns out that an analogy can be drawn between the constitutive models of linear viscoelasticity and of rate-dependent plasticity with kinematic hardening. The analogy is established by a correspondence between the line representing the elasticity law for the equilibrium stress in viscoelasticity and the axis of kinematic hardening for the plasticity models defined in this paper.