Development of plasticity and damage in vibrating structural elements performing guided rigid-body motions

Summary  A numerical algorithm for studying the development of plastic and damaged zones in a vibrating structural element with a large, guided rigid-body motion is presented. Beam-type elements vibrating in the small-strain regime are considered. A machine element performing rotatory motions, similar to an element of a slider-crank mechanism, is treated as a benchmark problem. Microstructural changes in the deforming material are described by the mesolevel variables of plastic strain and damage, which are consistently included into a macroscopic analysis of the overall beam motion. The method is based on an eigenstrain formulation, considering plastic strain and damage to contribute to an eigenstrain loading of a linear elastic background structure. Rigid-body coordinates are incorporated into this beam-type structural formulation, and an implicit numerical scheme is presented for iterative computation of the eigenstrains from the mesolevel constitutive behavior. Owing to the eigenstrain formulation, any of the existing constitutive models with internal variables could in principle be implemented. Linear elastic/perfectly plastic behavior is exemplarily treated in a numerical study, where plastic strain is connected to the Kachanov damage parameter by a simple damage law. Inelastic effects like plastic shakedown and damage-induced low-cycle rupture are shown to occur in the examplary problems. Received 1 September 1999; accepted for publication 9 March 2000