On plastic localization and failure in plane strain and round void containing tensile bars (Q579013)

Gurson's constitutive model describing effects of void nucleation and growth in ductile metals is adopted for numerical analysis of plastic localization and failure modes in axisymmetric and plane strain tensile tests. A simple numerically oriented treatment of void coalescence is utilized. The analysis is performed in the framework of the bifurcation approach and no initial imperfections are needed to trigger localizations. The unsymmetric eigenvalue problem is solved by using a perturbation scheme which essentially reduces the problem to a symmetric eigenvalue formulation for a recently proposed ``symmetrized comparison solid'' of nonassociated plasticity plus the easily computable perturbation correction. The results obtained are shown to qualitatively reproduce the essential features observed experimentally in uniaxial tests.