A self‐consistent approach for micro–macro modeling of elastic–plastic deformation in polycrystalline geomaterials

Summary This paper is devoted to multi-scale modeling of elastic–plastic deformation of a class of geomaterials with a polycrystalline microstructure. We have extended and improved the simplified polycrystalline model presented in [Zeng T. et al., 2014. Mech. Mater.69(1):132–145]. A rigorous and fully consistent self-consistent (SC) scheme is proposed to describe the interaction among plastic mineral grains. We have also deeply discussed the numerical issues related to the numerical implementation of the proposed micromechanical model. The efficiency of the proposed model and the related numerical procedure is evaluated in several representative cases. We have compared the numerical results respectively obtained from the fully SC model and two simplified ones. It is found that the SC model produces a softer stress–strain response than that of the simplified models. The comparisons between the estimation of overall behavior of a granite in different loading conditions and experimental data are also conducted. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.