A Plane-Strain Formulation of Elastic-Plastic Constitutive Laws

ABSTRACT

Constitutive laws for elastic-plastic materials are derived by eliminating the transverse stress component on the basis of the plane-strain constraint. This leads to a fictitious hardening and temperature dependence of the loading function. For standard elastic-plastic materials the resulting laws are associated; however, the plastic strain state is represented by equivalent plastic-strain measures, which also account for transverse yielding. The new constitutive laws, together with the standard reduced form of the equilibrium and compatibility equations, permit the formulation of the plane-strain elastic-plastic analysis problem in terms of the in-plane stress components only. In the case of perfectly plastic materials, the subsequent plane-strain yield surfaces are contained within a domain bounded by a limit surface which represents the yield condition normally adopted in plane-strain limit analysis.