The implicit standard material theory for modelling the nonassociative behaviour of metals

Summary  Modelling the elastoplastic or elastoviscoplastic behaviour of metallic materials exhibiting strain hardening and damage leads to complex nonassociative constitutive equations, sources of many theoretical and numerical troubles. The usual modelling of a nonassociative constitutive equation leads to the loss of the interesting and very useful properties of generalised standard materials deriving from the key concepts of convexity and normality. The argument that will be developed is that the bipotential concept is an appropriate answer. In the first part, after introducing the state variables generally used to describe the behaviour of metallic materials, the constitutive equations subjected to the principles of thermodynamics are derived from two potentials. The state potential gives the state laws, and the bipotential of dissipation delivers the evolution laws for state variables, through the implicit normality assumption. The second part is devoted to several particular applications to metal elastoplasticity and elastoviscoplasticity models. Received 29 March 2000; accepted for publication 26 September 2000