A stress triaxiality-dependent viscoplastic damage model to analyze ductile fracture under axisymmetric tensile loading

Abstract The aim of this paper is to gain insight for the transition of fracture initiation sites in notched tensile specimens. For this purpose, a stress triaxiality-dependent viscoplastic damage model was proposed for various types of notched tensile specimens, where the influence of stress triaxiality on damage, damage-free stress-strain curve and viscoplasticity was considered. Also, in this constitutive model, the consistency viscoplastic regularization method was used to solve the pathological mesh-dependent problem due to strain softening. A hybrid experimental-numerical approach was used to calibrate model parameters by using smooth and one type of round-notched tensile specimens. The same set of model parameters was then applied to predict ductile fracture for three other types of round-notched tensile specimens. Good agreement between experimental data and simulation results confirmed the transferability of model parameters to all types of tensile specimens considered and the ability of the proposed constitutive model to predict ductile fracture over a large range of positive stress triaxialities. This study found that at the onset of fracture critical damage parameters for all five types of tensile specimens were relatively constant, and fracture initiation sites in these specimens were associated with critical damage parameters, shifting from the center to the notch root. Therefore, the critical damage parameter was defined as a ductile fracture criterion and the fracture strain for all the five types of tensile specimens was successfully predicted.